Coventry Patmore

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LITERARY
LIVES

EDITED BY

W. ROBERTSON
NICOLL

COVENTRY
PATMORE

Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive

in 2010 witii funding from

University of Britisii Columbia Library

http://www.archive.org/details/coventrypatmorOOgoss

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COVENTRY
PATMORE

BY

EDMUND GOSSE

LITERARY LIVES

LONDON: HODDER AND
STOUGHTON MDCCCCV

The Publishers wish to acknowledge their indebtedness
to Mrs. Paimore and Air. Basil Champneys for kind
J>ermissio?i to include many of the illustrations.

Preface

THE chief, and almost the only, public
source of information about the facts
of Patmore's life is the Memoirs and
Correspondence, in two volumes, pub-
lished hy Mr. Basil Champneys in 1900. Mr.
Champneys, whose work was performed with
admirable judgment and sympathy, was sup-
plied with all the necessary documents by
Mrs. Patmore, whose " devoted foresight dur-
ing her husband's life, and indefatigable indus-
try then and later," are cordially acknowledged
by the biographer. This large work was not
a memoir of Coventry Patmore alone, but of
his parents, his wives, his deceased children,
and many of his relatives. As a collection of
documents, extremely full and authentic, it
can never be superseded.

The present little volume is intended to
supplement the official biography on the
critical side. Mr. Champneys dealt with the
records of Patmore's life, and of his surround-
ings. He had little space left in which to
consider the works, which, indeed, could
scarcely be analysed impartially in a family
memoir. To the character and to the writings
of Coventry Patmore, with whom for many
years I enjoyed the privilege of a close friend-

V b

vi Preface

ship, I had long given careful attention ; and
this book, although delayed in publication until
now, represents impressions which its author
formed during Patmore's life or shortly after-
wards. I have been glad to revise my record
of facts by collation with Mr. Champneys'
authoritative statements, but the opinions are
my own and were defined long ago. In May
1884 Patmore proposed to appoint me his
literary executor, and although he presently
released me from a duty which appeared to
me better fitted to a member of his own
communion, the idea that I might be called
upon to give my impressions of his work thus
became familiar to me.

The Editor of this series has kindly allowed
me to interpolate in this monograph certain
observations and notes which I published, soon
after Patmore's death, in the North American
Review and in the Contemporary Review. These
impressions were very carefully recorded while
they were quite fresh in my memory, and I
could not have put them into another shape
without impairing their fidelity.

To Mrs. Meynell, who, during the latest
years of his life, shared the intellectual confi-
dences of Patmore to a deeper degree than any
other friend, I owe my warmest thanks for the
communication of some invaluable documents

July 1904. E. G.

Contents

PAGE

Preface ........ v

CHAPTER I
Early Years (1823-1846) ..... i

CHAPTER H
Life in London (1846-1862) .... 34

CHAPTER HI
"The Angel in the House" .... 78

CHAPTER IV

Hampstead and Heron's Ghyll (1862-1870) . . loi

CHAPTER V

Last Years (1870-1896) 134

vii

viii Contents

CHAPTER VI PAGE

Personal Characteristics 176

CHAPTER Vn
Literary Position and Aims . . . • 213

Chapter I

EARLY YEARS (i 823-1 846)

COVENTRY PATMORE was the
grandson of a silversmith of Lud-
gate Hill, whose son, Peter George
Patmore (1786-1855), adopted the profession
of letters, and was associated with Charles
Lamb,Hazlitt, John Hamilton Reynolds and the
minor writers of the so-called Cockney School.
P. G. Patmore was a notorious rather than a
distinguished author, and it is difficult to re-
concile the species of abhorrence with which
most of his contemporaries regarded him, with
the bold and pious claims to our respect which
his son never ceased to put forward. It was a
permanent annoyance to Coventry Patmore
that his father was treated as a black sheep by
his acquaintances, and he made many efforts to
upset what he said was a malignant legend.
This was the more honourable to his affection
because the reputation of his father had in-
flicted serious injury on himself as a youth.

I

Coventry Patmore

Not only, when the poet was twenty-two, did
his father suddenly disappear to the Continent,
leaving him without resources, but P. G. Pat-
more's ugly fame in respect to the Scott duel
constantly rose before the younger man as an
obstacle to his progress. Robert Browning
told me that when, in 1846, at the house of
Barry Cornwall, he asked Thackeray to let him
introduce the young Coventry Patmore to him,
the novelist boisterously refused, adding, " I
won't touch the hand of a son of that mur-
derer ! " That Thackeray, in his generous
way, immediately repented, acknowledging
that the son was not responsible for the father,
and that he hastened to help the former as " a
most deserving and clever young fellow who
will be a genius some day," does not detract
from the impression which the original out-
burst gives us of P. G. Patmore's being
regarded as a kind of social outlaw.

He owed this unpleasant position to pecu-
liarities of temperament, which it is easier
to-day to feel than to define, but mainly to his
conduct in the too-famous duel in which John
Scott, the editor of the London Magazine^ was

Ear/y Tears [iS 2 2-^^ ^(>) 3

fatally wounded by Lockhart's friend Christie.
Scott had pressed his quarrel, which was a liter-
ary one, upon Christie, and on both sides the
seconds seem to have been much more blood-
thirsty than their principals. Christie fired his
first shot into the air, and Scott, it was thought,
would have done the same if Patmore, who
acted as Scott's second, had not insisted, " You
must not speak, you have nothing for it now
but firing." Under his second's pressure,
therefore, Scott aimed at Christie, who in
response shot him dead. This conduct on
Patmore's part was universally blamed, and
Scott in dying seems to have corroborated the
popular impression. The fullest, indeed the
only, coherent account of this unhappy affair is
that which is given by Mr. Lang in his Life of
John Gibson Lockhart ; the exact circumstances
being still obscure, so far at least as Patmore's
responsibility is concerned. But it has to be
said that his whole attitude afterwards, — which
is of more real importance to us in forming a
judgment than his behaviour through a few
heated minutes of crisis can be, — does not im-
press us, as it certainly did not impress his

Coventry Patmore

contemporaries, with a sense of P. G. Patmore's
delicacy or gentlemanly feeling. His son,
however, defended him through thick and thin,
and would not permit the least aspersion of his
honour to pass unchallenged. It seems pro-
bable that it was in the capacity of father to his
brilliant eldest boy that Peter George Patmore
displayed the most attractive side of his char-
acter. He was a sympathetic, proud and am-
bitious parent, and an encourager of Coventry's
genius. In our present inquiry we may be
content frankly to record so much.

In 1822, the year after the duel, Peter George
Patmore married a Scotch lady, Eliza Robert-
son, and the first of their four children, Coven-
try Kersey Dighton Patmore, was born at
Woodford, in Essex, on July 23, 1823. We
may note, in passing, that the poet was of the
generation of George Eliot, Ruskin and Mat-
thew Arnold, who were slightly older, and of
Woolner, Huxley and D. G. Rossetti, who
were slightly younger than he. The childhood
of Coventry Patmore seems to have been irre-
gular and free ; he was subjected to none of the
usual discipline of family life. His father was

Early Tears (i 823-1 846) 5

abetted in spoiling him by the grandmother,
whom Coventry, in his large way, was wont in
after years to describe as " one of the strongest-
minded and most intellectual women " he had
ever met. She doted on her eldest grandson,
and seems to have distinguished him from his
brothers by lavishing upon him a peculiar fond-
ness. He used to declare that the earliest sen-
tence he spoke distinctly was " Coventry is a
clever fellow," repeated from his grandmother's
lips. From the first his own mother was es-
tranged from him by this extravagant partiality
of his father and his grandmother. Patmore said
that his mother counted for nothing in his early
training, except as a dark figure which it was
always wise and generally easy to evade. She
was repellent in manner, and Mr. Basil Champ-
neys records that she welcomed Coventry's first
wife without cordiality or tact. Patmore told
me that when his earliest volume of poems
was published his mother neither affected any
interest in it nor would read a page of it. She
died in her son's house in 185 1, the grandmother
following at the age of ninety- three in 1853,
and the father at the age of sixty-nine in 1855.

Coventry Patmore

In constant and successful revolt against the
sternness of his mother, and encouraged by the
flatteries of his father and grandmother, Cov-
entry Patmore grew up a strange child, priggish,
enthusiastic, eccentric. His marked intellec-
tual gifts gave him an easy predominance over
his younger brothers, who were treated as if be-
longing to a less privileged class. They were
all lucky enough to spend a good deal of time
in the country house of their grand-uncle,
Robert Stevens, in Epping Forest. It must
now be noted that our information about Pat-
more's doings for the next dozen years depends
exclusively upon his own recollections.

This memoir will be unsuccessful in giving a
true picture of an extraordinary man if it does
not cope with the apparent inconsistencies of his
temperament. It is best to say at once that
though Coventry Patmore had a genuine pas-
sion for truth, and was sincere and direct to an
unusual and admirable degree, he had yet no
historical instinct. His dates were always
uncertain, and his record of incidents seldom
tallied with the humdrum procession of facts.
In the warm and misty atmosphere of his

Early Tears (i 823-1 846) 7

imagination, things took an exaggerated shape
and a distorted direction. His memory am-
plified quantities before they could reach his
lips in words, and he habitually talked in a sort
of guarded hyperbole. Doubtless this ten-
dency to precise yet overstrained statement
grew upon him in later years, but it was in
these years that all his recollections of childhood
were written down or spoken. It ought not
to be difficult, with caution, to translate his
anecdotes back out of Patmorese, but this has
not always been done. For instance, when we
are gravely told that Coventry and his brothers
had an " amusement," which they imposed
upon themselves, which consisted of tying each
other's hands behind their backs, closing their
eyes and jumping into a quick-set hedge, while
" he who bore the experience with the least
flinching was considered the victor," our first
impression is that the story of the Greek boy
and the fox is at last outdone, and our second
that the family must have habitually resembled
a set of Heidelberg students fresh from the
duello. But calmer thought reminds us that
this is simply a specimen of Patmorese, that

8 Coventry Pa ignore

perhaps once some such contest was proposed,
or even attempted, and that the idea firmly
implanted itself in the poet's mind. One dash
of bramble across the cheek would be enough
on which to build this structure of Spartan
discipline.

Guarding ourselves, therefore, against our
subject's constitutional tendency to emphasis,
we obtain from the various records of Pat-
more's childhood an impression, not merely
interesting in itself, but consistent with the
later history of the man. He displayed at
a very early age some of the leading charac-
teristics of his future years, an indomitable
doggedness of will, a passion for books, a ten-
dency to mystical contemplation. He quaintly
states, in his fragment of an autobiography,
that he was an Agnostic until his eleventh
year, when he happened to open a devo-
tional book, whereupon, he says, " it struck
me what an exceedingly fine thing it would be
if there really was a God." But this feeling
soon subsided, and he seems to date his first
direct tendency towards religion from the time
when he was in Paris, as a lad of eighteen.

Early Tears (182 3-1 846) 9

Meanwhile, " for some two or three years before
I was fifteen I had devoted all my spare
time, with great assiduity, to science, especi-
ally chemistry, in which I made real advance.
My father greatly encouraged me in such
studies, of which he knew something himself,
and he strained his not very abundant means
to enable me to fit up a laboratory, with
furnaces and other apparatus. I did not stop
at repeating the experiments of others, but
carried on original investigations, not alto-
gether without results, among which was the
discovery of a new chloride of bromine."
That new chloride of bromine was an impres-
sive ornament of conversation in Patmore's
later years, and was always received, of course,
in respectful silence. But one would like to
have had Faraday's opinion.

Whether Patmore was a pioneer in chemistry
or no, his proficiency in general science seems
to have been remarkable. He studied mathe-
matics, " until there were no properly algebraic
difficulties which I had not overcome." A
friend pronounced him, when he was about
sixteen, " able to rank as a Senior Optime at

lO Coventry Pat7nore

the Mathematical Tripos." Patmore dwelt on
all this because, as he said, " there are many
persons who entertain the strange opinion
that ignorance of natural science is a qualifi-
cation for forming a right judgment in spiritual
matters." It is, indeed, a strange opinion,
since Newton and Euler are far from being
the only great mathematicians who have culti-
vated a child-like piety. This phase in Pat-
more's boyhood culminated in its being pro-
posed that he should be sent to Cambridge,
where he might have competed with Stokes
and Cayley. But his father shrank from the
expense of life at the University.

Such absorption in natural science, in which
the poet perhaps exaggerated his recollections
of an intelligent childish pastime, seems incon-
sistent with the definite literary training to
which, it is certain, his father began to subject
him from the age of fourteen. " My father,"
he says, " did all he could to develop my
still greater ardour for poetry and the best
sort of prose. His own taste was so severely
good that, at fifteen, I cared little for any
but the classics of English literature. At this

Ear/j Tears {iS 2 2,-1^^^) ii

age I had read almost all the standard poetry
and much of the best secular prose in our
language, and was in the habit of studying
it critically." To bring this statement within
the range of credibility, however, it should be
remarked that the elder Patmore had a way
of marking in pencil what he considered the
very best passages in each writer. These,
and these only, he commended to his son's
attention, and Coventry, in his juvenile arro-
gance, took a pleasure in reading nothing
which was not so marked. This is what he
means by studying poetry " critically " ; the
better word would be " eclectically." But
the habit thus early formed of selecting and
appropriating only what a high standard of
taste presented to him as the best influenced
Patmore to the end of his life, and was a very
important element in his intellectual training.
He was taught to prefer a collection of
specimens to a general system of knowledge,
and his notion of a poetic garden became a
posy of rare flowers. In the passage just quoted
he undoubtedly overestimates his acquaint-
ance with English literature as a whole ; he

I 2 Coventry Patmore

had given impassioned meditation to brilliant
fragments of a multitude of authors, but
there were few of which he possessed a com-
plete or general knowledge. All his critical
judgments, from first to last, bore the stamp
of his eclecticism.

A notable exception to his habit of selecting
was, however, the complete study he made,
as a boy, and constantly repeated in man-
hood, of the plays of Shakespeare. Here, also,
perhaps, he was an eclectic, choosing Shake-
speare from all the authors of England as the
one best worthy of detailed consideration.
His own earliest literary productions were two
essays, the one on Macbeth^ the other on the
Two Gentlemen of Verona, which were published
many years later, and to which the author
was inclined to assign an extremely early date.
A letter from his father proves that Coventry
had begun to write verses before he went to
France in the summer of 1839, ^^^ from
another source we know that these included
the first drafts of " The River," and ^' The
Woodman's Daughter." It seems certain that
the Shakespearian essays were composed about

Early Years (i 823-1 846) 13

the same time, and we have therefore the
occasion to observe Coventry Patmore as a
writer of considerable versatility and talent
before he enters his seventeenth year. His
father now sent him to St. Germain, in
order to improve his French, and he stayed at
this school for six months. But, he tells us,
" as my father stipulated that I should have
an apartment of my own, and should live with
the headmaster's family, learning from private
tutors, and not in the classes, I did not mix
with the other boys, nor learn to talk very
fluently." He used to spend " all his Sundays "
at the house in Paris of Mrs. Catherine Gore,
the then highly-popular author of fashionable
novels, ridiculed later on by Thackeray. " She
had a fine apartment in the Place Vendome,
and, on Sundays, her rooms were full of the
best literary and political society of Paris."
Coventry Patmore was too young and too
inexperienced to profit by the social advantages
of Mrs. Gore's probably rather flashy saloon.
The author of Cecil : or, The Adventures of a
Coxcomb, though the wife of a needy lifeguards-
man and forced by her husband's poverty to

14 Coventry Patmore

pour forth a stream of social romances, was a
personage of some importance in the elder Pat-
more's circle of acquaintances. He is seen at
this time to be solicitous that Coventry shall
cultivate so important a friend. Mrs. Gore
had an attractive daughter, of about eighteen,
who afterwards became Lady Edward Thynne.
For this girl he " entertained a passion of a
kind not uncommon in youths, a passion which
neither hoped nor cared much for a return.
... I remember praying more than once,
with torrents of tears, that the young lady
might be happy, especially in marriage, with
whomsoever it might be." He was very shy,
and Miss Gore used to snub him unmercifully.
The incident would scarcely be notable, were
it not that in later years Patmore always
attributed to this " calf-love " the earliest
awakening of his apprehensions of love in the
peculiarly metaphysical form in which it after-
wards appealed to him. In Miss Gore he
worshipped the earliest of a series of " angels "
who were the avatars, as it were, of his ideal.
There is no doubt that at this time there was
a remarkable development of his psychological

Early Tears (182 3-1 846) 15

powers, and that he began towards the end
of 1839 ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ strict sense himself, and
no longer a mirror of the minds around him.
He attributes to this period the assumption of
a power " to discern sexual impurity and vir-
ginal purity, the one as the tangible blackness
and horror of hell, and the other as the very
bliss of heaven, and the flower and consumma-
tion of love between man and woman." If his
memory of these meditations and apprehensions
was correct, and it probably was, at the age of
seventeen he had learned the central principles
which were to guide the philosophy of his life.
A Parisian phrenologist, named Deville,
examined Coventry Patmore's head, and pro-
nounced it to be that of a poet. On his return
to London, the youth determined seriously to
cultivate the art of verse, and he spent a long
time (he says " about a year ") in polishing
and completing the two pieces which he seems
to have begun before he went to St. Ger-
mains. These were " The River," and " The
Woodman's Daughter," which occupy together
about forty pages of his earliest volume. His
father had these poems set up in type, desiring

1 6 Coventry Patmore -

him to write others and immediately bring
out a book. But the boy's inclination or
talent failed him. None of these original
proofs of 1840 seem to be in existence ; if
they were, it would be interesting, and indeed
important, to compare them with the text of
the same lyrics in 1844, the publication of
Tennyson's Poems of 1842 having intervened be-
tween the two events. It would appear that the
elder Patmore sent copies of the original proofs
to several persons of critical distinction, and in
particular to Barry Cornwall, to Laman Blan-
chard and to Leigh Hunt. The latter was
at this time a person of great authority on
the Liberal side of the world of letters, the
triumphant success of his Legend of Florence
having at last, at the age of fifty-six, made
him the centre of much public curiosity. In
his benevolent way, Leigh Hunt was very
complimentary about Coventry Patmore's early
poems, and the youthful poet, perhaps late in
1840, paid a visit to him. Nearly half a cen-
tury later, he gave the following vivid account
of the incident : —

" I set off with a letter from my father, an

Early Tears (i 823-1 846) 17

old friend of the poet, informing him of my
ambition to see him. Arriving at his house, a
very small one in a small square somewhere in
the extreme West, after a walk of some five or
six miles, I was informed that the poet was
at home, and asked to sit down until he came
to me. This he did after I had waited in the
parlour at least two hours, when the door was
opened and a most picturesque gentleman, with
hair flowing nearly or quite to his shoulders,
a beautiful velvet coat and a Vandyke collar of
lace about a foot deep, appeared, rubbing his
hands and smiling ethereally, and saying, with-
out a word of preface or notice of my having
waited so long, ' This is a beautiful world,
Mr. Patmore ! ' I was so struck by this re-
mark that it has eclipsed all memory of what
occurred during the remainder of my visit."

Leigh Hunt was to be a generous supporter of
Coventry Patmore in his earliest efforts, and
the younger man was a sincere admirer of
Rimini and of the Indicator. In later years,
he spoke of Leigh Hunt to Aubrey de Vere as
worthy of honour, " a true poet and a zealous
lover of poetry." But there was a certain

2

1 8 Coventry Patmore

flavour or perfume about the literary character
of Leigh Hunt which ultimately became highly-
distasteful to Patmore, and this, no doubt,
affects with a needless harshness the picturesque
portrait which has just been quoted.

Of the next four years we possess slight
record. In 1842, after going through a
solitary crisis of religious despondency which
seems to have checked for the time being
the development of his intellect, the young
Patmore made a visit of several months to
some relatives in Edinburgh. " They were
very pious members of the then newborn Free
Kirk, and were the first religious persons I had
ever had anything to do with. I was at first
greatly delighted with this atmosphere, and
the warmth with which I communicated my
own aspirations much interested my new
friends in me ; but the inequality of my
moods startled and somewhat shocked one
of my aunts, who told me that my strange
alternations of ardent effort and despondent
indifference reminded her of SauL" He was
urged to make testimony of his faith, and in
particular was desired^ to deliver extempora-

Early Tears (i 823-1 846) 19

neous prayer aloud, at a prayer-meeting. He
was the shyest of youths, and we can easily
imagine " the agony with which, at the request
of my new friends, I dropped on my knees in
their presence, and remained there utterly
incapable of venting a word, and at last rose
silent, confused and ashamed." His Scotch
relations were unceasing in their expressions of
Protestant horror with regard to the Roman
Faith, and Patmore was conscious of " a
moment's attractive thought," born of their
pious excesses, that the much abused Catholics
might after all be possibly in the right. But
this immediately passed away, and did not
recur for several years.

Love and Religion were the two masters
which led the spirit of Patmore through the
whole of his earthly journey, and if we would
follow the evolution of his character, we must
not neglect any evidence of the work of either.
The following sonnet, then, written in 1843,
and not, I think, reprinted until now since
1844, has a biographical value : —

At nine years old I was Love's willing Page :
Poets love earlier than other men,

2 0 Coventry Patmore

And would love later, but for the prodigal pen.
" Oh ! wherefore hast thou, Love, ceased now to engage
Thy servitor, found true in every stage

Of all the eleven springs gone by since then ? "

Vain quest ! — and I no more Love's denizen.
Sought the poor leisure of the Golden Age.
But lately wandering, from the world apart,

Chance brought me where, before her quiet nest,
A village-girl was standing vdthout art.

My soul sprang up from its lethargic rest.
The slack veins tightened all across my heart.

And love once more was aching in my breast.

The poet forgets that between nine years
and twenty had occurred sixteen, when the
soul's " lethargic rest " was broken by the
image of Miss Gore, but the sincerity of this
sonnet is obvious. It was probably the latest
piece composed for the volume of 'Poems by
Coventry Patmore which, appeared in 1844, from
the shop of Moxon.

The publication of Tennyson's two volumes
of Poems in 1842 formed a crisis in the history
of English verse. In the presence of that new,
or newly observed, planet, other stars seemed
insignificant. The circle which had begun to
form around the boyish Patmore felt it neces-
sary to assert its allegiance ; we find Laman

Early Tears (i 823-1 846) 21

Blanchard declaring that his " strong and clear
conviction of the extreme beauty and finish"
of young Coventry's MS. verse was not
affected by the new luminary ; " nothing that
Tennyson has done " need cause despair in
Patmore. But the resonance of Tennyson's
success induced the friends of Patmore to
delay, and it was not until 1844, when the
poet was just of age, that Moxon published
the thin green volume of Poems by Coventry
Patmore^ which is now a great biographical
rarity. A poet's first book is always an impor-
tant milestone in his career ; the journey of
life is not the same after this earliest experience.
This was peculiarly the case with Patmore, who
had been surrounded by care and praise,
daintily brought up in an atmosphere of cul-
tured encouragement, and for whom the final
disclosure to the world was expected to be
an actual blossoming of the aloe. His father,
with pardonable but foolish pride, had exag-
gerated the solemnity, the importance of his
son's poetic mission. The picture of Coventry,
which Mr. Champneys has restored from.
P. G. Patmore's Chatsworth, is mawkish with

2 2 Coventry Patmore

parental fatuity. The only phrase it contains,
which possesses any value, is the following, in
which the personal appearance of Coventry Pat-
more at the age of twenty is preserved for us : —

" See ! his lithe, fragile form is bending
over a book, that is spread open on his knees,
his head drooping towards it like a plucked
flower. The pale face is resting on the clasped
hand, over which, and all round the small,
exquisitely modelled head, fall heavy waves of
auburn hair, concealing all but one pale cheek
— pale and cold as marble, but smooth and
soft as a girl's."

The Poems of 1 844, however, as we look back
upon it across sixty years, was a volume which
might excuse in a father a somewhat rhapso-
dical burst of language. There could be no
question that, with strange lapses of taste and
lack of finish, it had a real distinction of its
own. It spoke, not in borrowed tones, but
in the voice of a new person. The effect of
the pieces has become faint ; their perfume
has mainly evaporated. But it is easy to under-
stand that they awakened hope and enthusiasm.
T he poet's biographers have dwelt upon the

Ear/y Years (i 823-1 846) 23

wild guesses which contemporary reviewers
made as to the source of his inspiration. He
was accused of imitating Leigh Hunt, Procter,
and Keats, but there is no trace of these writers
upon his style. Nor is it easy to discover any
but the most general characteristics of Words-
worth or even Coleridge in the texture or
form of Patmore's early verses. One influence
there is, and it is one which his critics have
uniformly, but very strangely, failed to recog-
nize. All through the book he is under the
spell of certain lyrics published by his elder
contemporary, Elizabeth Barrett, and it is of
her, and not of Tennyson or Coleridge, that
the lad continually reminds us.

To realize this influence it is necessary to
refer, not to the later revisions of such pieces
as " Sir Hubert " and " The River," but to
their original text in 1844. Miss Barrett had
published in 1838 her collection of pieces in
many styles, entitled The Seraphim, and Other
Poems. This contained, in their earliest form,
some of the most characteristic of her lyrics,
— for instance, " Cowper's Grave," " Isobel's
Child," and " The Sleep." It also contained

24 Coventry Patmore

several na'iVely psychological studies of senti-
ment, of which " The Poet's Vow " is a pro-
minent example. Coventry Patmore began to
write verses in 1839, shortly after the publica-
tion of The Seraphim, and the form and spirit
of his earliest pieces is curiously and sometimes
closely coloured by his admiration for the new
poetess. In such a poem as the following,
even in the technical imperfection of the second
stanza, it is of Miss Barrett, and not of Tenny-
son or Coleridge, that the ear is reminded: —

I knew a soft-eyed lady, from a noble foreign land ;
Her words, I thought, were lowest when we walked out

hand in hand.
I began to say, " God pleasing, I shall have her for my

bride."
Bitter, bitter, bitter was it to me when she died.

In the street a man since stopped me : in a noble foreign

tongue
He said he was a stranger, poor, and strangers all among.
I know your thoughts, yet tell you, World, — I gave him

all I had.
But I — I'm much the wisest ; — it is you, O World !

that's mad.

He stared upon the proffered purse ; then took it, hand

and all.
O ! what a look he gave me, while he kept my hand in

thraU!

Early Tears (1823-1846) 25

And press'd it with a gratitude that made the blushes

start ;
For I had not deserved it, and it smote me to the heart.

The moment was one of revival in the popu-
lar estimate of poetry, succeeding a long ob-
scuration. But the opposition of the press was
still violent, and suspicion of both passion and
simplicity in verse was loudly expressed in high
places. The reviews, after twenty years, were
still in doubt how to spell the name of Keats,
and treated him, if they did not insult his
memory, merely as a youth of immature talent,
as a kind of irrehgious Kirke White. Browning,
who had printed some of his finest things, and
lately The Blot in the Scutcheon, was valued in
a very small, and apparently narrowing circle.
But Bailey's Festus had opened the doors to
transcendental imagery, and Tennyson's lyrics
to the beauty of poetic art. There was, never-
theless, a dominant taste for the purely senti-
mental, which was clearly and delicately fed
by the verses of Richard Monckton Milnes, of
Caroline Norton, of John Moultrie ; and this
laboured to detach into its own pensive pro-
vince the more fiery and original forms of talent.

2 6 Coventry Patmore

It had succeeded in winning from Tennyson
" Dora " and " The May Queen " ; it had
threatened to lay down a law that poetry must
be emasculated or must cease to exist. These
conditions, — a fashionable sentimentality in
the ascendant, with a rebellious minority eager
for more force and flame, — prepared for each
new pretendant a stirring reception from
the reviews. Blackwood^ in its ceaseless war
against all that is beautiful and of good report,
recognized in the poems of 1844 " the life into
which the slime of the Keateses [sic) and
Shelleys of former times has fecundated."
But Leigh Hunt in public and Bulwer Lytton
in private praised their promise highly, and
their merits introduced their young author to
Miss Barrett, to Robert Browning,^ to Milnes,
and eventually to Tennyson.

But these introductions were preceded by

1 In an unpublished letter of July 31, 1844, Browning
wrote : " A very interesting young poet has blushed into
bloom this season. I send you his soul's child ; the contents
were handed and bandied about, and Moxon was told bj
the knowing ones of the literary turf that ' Patmore was safe
to win.' So Moxon relented from his stern purposes of
publishing no more verse on his own account, and did
publish this." T. Noon Talfourd welcomed the volume of
1844 2S "a marvellous instance of genius anticipating time."

Early Years (i 823-1 846) 27

an event which was critical in the career of
Coventry Patmore. Scarcely had his first
volume of poems issued from the press, than
he was shocked by being left abruptly to
his own resources. Hitherto, as Mr. Basil
Champneys has said, Coventry Patmore
" had been quite free from financial pressure :
every whim of his had been indulged, and
what literary work he had so far done had had
no further object than occupation and fame."
But P. G. Patmore had been living far beyond
his means, had engaged in railway speculation,
and now found it prudent towards the close
of 1845, in company with his wife, to with-
draw suddenly to the Continent. Coventry
was in no way prepared for this revolution,
nor did his parents so much as bid him fare-
well. A letter, enclosing a remittance, and
announcing that he must not expect another,
was the first and only intimation of his father's
flight that he received. For the next year
he worked from hand to mouth at what odd
literary jobs were open to a clever but un-
trained youth. When the remittance was
exhausted, as it soon was, verses, short articles

2 8 Coventry Patmore

and stray translations brought him in about
twenty-five shillings a week. He told me
that, at his darkest hour, he found himself
reduced to three and sixpence. This sum
he regarded as less than nothing, and he there-
fore expended it on ices. Returning home
without a penny, he found an envelope con-
taining payment for an article he had forgotten,
and his resources never sank quite so low
again. He mentioned the reckless act about
the ices with a sort of pride which was very
characteristic of him, as though Fate had been
cowed by the insolence of his detachment.

It was during these months of poverty and
independence that Coventry Patmore formed
the most valuable friendship of his early life.
Cast forth out of the snug nest in which
paternal indulgence had so long protected
him, the young poet seems to have faced the
dark streets of London, and the horrors of
cheap lofty lodgings, with complete courage.
He was sustained in this by the companionship
of one of broader experience than his own,
of maturer years and more commanding
genius. It seems to have been in the winter

Early Tears (i 823-1 846) 29

of 1845, and soon after the flight of his parents
to Paris, that Coventry Patmore met Tenny-
son for the first time. The elder poet had
passed through great tribulation, smitten at
once in fortune and in health. He had,
however, recently been lifted out of these
deep waters by the timely grant of a pension
of ;^200, which enabled him to live in modest
comfort and even to travel a little. It enabled
him to come up sometimes to London from
Cheltenham, which was then his head-quarters.
He was still unwell and out of spirits ; Patmore
exaggerated both his age and his disease when
he saw him first, taking him to be a man of
advanced years, doomed to die in a few months.
As a matter of fact, Tennyson was but thirty-
six, and his constitution was wiry and robust.
He was in a neurotic condition, still being
told by the doctor " not to read, not to think."
He was already meditating the composition
of a poem, half idyll, half satire, which should
deal with the question of female discipline
and education. In other words. The Princess
was beginning to take form in his mind.

At this time, and for several years to come,

30 Coventry Patmore

Tennyson was scarcely seen in general com-
pany. He had not so completely thrown
off the morbid melancholy which had assailed
him after the collapse of Dr. Allen's under-
takings in 1844 as to be willing to confront
society. Indeed, it is probable that he was
physically unfitted for it. Patmore told me
that during the early months of their friend-
ship, Tennyson often sank into a sort of gloomy
reverie, which would fall upon him, in Keats'
phrase —

Sudden from heaven, like a weeping cloud, '

and put a stop to all conversation. While they
walked the streets at night in endless perambu-
lation, or while they sat together over a single
meal in a suburban tavern, Tennyson's dark
eyes would suddenly be set as those of a man
who sees a vision, and no further sound would
pass his lips, perhaps for an hour. These pecu-
liarities were endured with patience by the
younger of the two companions, partly be-
cause he was himself inclined to reverie, but
particularly because his extreme admiration
for Tennyson made him more than indulgent:

Early Tears (i 823-1 846) 31

On this subject some further remarks may be
required.

Patmore's attitude to Tennyson in later
years ceased to be cordial, and was at length
almost defiant. The intimacy had flourished
from 1845 to about 1852, when it began to
wane ; after 1856 there was little evidence of
its existence. From this time forward a
long estrangement gradually developed between
the poets, and with no quarrel or dispute they
fell apart, and never met again. In the
later years of his own somewhat arrogant
independence, Patmore was vexed to think
that he could ever have been subjugated by
another mind as he unquestionably was by
that of Tennyson. His love of truth forbade
him to deny the enslavement, but he did not
love to dwell upon it. He said that he had
wasted years in following Tennyson about
" like a dog," and that he had gained nothing
from the sacrifice. He used to declare that
Tennyson had never really cared about him,
but had merely accepted his companionship
to escape from his own thoughts ; that Tenny-
son's conversation had always been egotistical

3 2 Coventry Patmore

and useless, and that Patmore, in devoting
himself to his company, had been worshipping
an empty idol. He would tell little innocent
anecdotes of Tennyson's simplicity, which he
would treat as instances of levity. All this
was Patmore at his worst, in the rasping mood
which he too often adopted in the reminis-
cences of his old age. But in happier hours,
when he was more genially inspired, he would
acknowledge what an unsurpassed advantage
it had been to him, as a youth of two and
twenty, to be admitted to the confidence of
that noble and unique spirit, and he would
admit, with generosity, that the great dark
man was not always wrapped in the cloak of
his silent melancholy, but that he would with
equal suddenness emerge from the cloud, and
emit glorious sparkles of thought about God
and man, and about the divine art of Poetry.

The friendship with Tennyson was at its
height when, in November 1846, through the
intervention of Monckton Milnes, — who had
been induced by Mrs. Procter to take practical
interest in Patmore, — the young poet's strain
for daily bread was relieved by his nomination

Coventry Pattnore.

Front a Drawing by John Brett, A.R.A. (1S55).

^Reproduced from Mr. Basil Chanip-ieys,
'"Coventry Patniore" by kind per-
mission of Messrs. Geo. IJell 1.^ Sons.^

Early Tears (i 823-1 846) 33

to the post of assistant in the Library of the
British Museum. It appears that Milnes also
gave him some secretarial employment, and en-
gagedhim to help in the arrangement of material
in the famous Life and Letters of Keats which
appeared two years later. At this time Pat-
more was writing little or no verse, but was
engrossed in the technical study of the art of
poetry, and his faculties were directed rather
to the exercise of prose, in which he had now
found a medium in which he could express
his ideas with ease.

Chapter II

LIFE IN LONDON (1846-1862)

THE excitement caused by the publica-
tion of his early poems had no sooner
subsided than Patmore began to regard
them in an almost contemptuous light of com-
mon sense. Escaping from the hot-house air in
which he had been educated, brought face to
face with the facts of life and forced to look at
literature from a healthy standpoint, his earliest
discovery was of the weakness of his own over-
praised and childish verses. He told Sutton,
in the spring of 1847, that he was abashed at
the thought of his foolish haste in publishing
before his mind was matured, and added that,
when aU his friends were praising " The River "
and " Lilian," and falling into ecstasies over
" The Woodman's Daughter," he himself
" was conscious from the first of the defective
character of the book." There can be no
question that the admirable judgment of
Tennyson, so happily secured in exchange for

L>ife in London 3 5

the sultry complaisance of the old Cockney
circle, had much to do with this healthier
condition of his spirit.

Patmore was prevented at this time by a
consciousness of failure from recurring to the
practice of verse. He was greatly occupied
with other interests, literary, moral and
material, and he considered that he '' wanted
the grand essential leisure for writing poetry."
In saying this he was, no doubt, repeating a
formula of Tennyson's, who was in the habit
of justifying the aimless, dreamy existence
which he himself led, by asserting, — and per-
haps with truth, — that a sauntering life of
leisure was the only one in which a poet could
do justice to his imagination. Patmore was
now thrilled and subdued by the genius of
Emerson, which was then at the height of its
splendour, having quite recently been revealed
to a few first English admirers. In his haste
to grasp the idealism of Emerson, Patmore
threw Coleridge to the winds, and it was not
until much later that he returned to the earlier
and the subtler master. He says (Feb. 15,
1847) : " I am a lover of Ralph Emerson. I

3 6 Coventry Patmore

have read all his Essays at least three times
over." This enthusiasm did not, however,
blind him to Emerson's inconsistencies and
illogicalities, and it is interesting enough to
see the youthful Patmore, as by Instinct, put-
ting his finger on that want of " the quality of
reverence with regard to God," which was to
be the rift in the lute of his admiration for the
American philosopher. Meanwhile, the con-
versation of Tennyson and the writings of
Emerson are seen to be the intellectual food
on which Patmore builds up within his own
soul a new man, the man with whom we are
in the remainder of this study to be familiar.

His mind was exceedingly disturbed at this
period ; " the mirror," he wrote, " though not
cracked, I hope, is much clouded." We may
form an impression of his personal appearance
at this time : very tall and thin, his small
bright head poised lightly on his shoulders,
a look of admirable candour in the broad
forehead, prominent mobile lips, and sparkling
eyes. These latter, doubtless, as we see them
in Brett's admirable drawing of a few years
later, were what gave positive charm to the

Life tJt London 37

features, — these dark, liquid, vivid eyes, and
the silky, rolling hair. Otherwise, to a super-
ficial or unsympathetic observer, the impression
may have been of an angular young man,
shy, almost saturnine, not ready in speech.

At the house of Laman Blanchard, as is
supposed, he met at this time a lady slightly
his junior, the orphan daughter of the Reverend
Edward Andrews, who had been the Congre-
gationalist minister of Beresford Chapel,
Wandsworth. Emily Augusta Andrews had just
entered her twenty-fourth year, while Coven-
try Patmore was approaching the end of his.
The young lady was a transcendentalist ; their
views about Emerson were identical ; on both
sides the attraction seems to have been instant
and complete. During a May-day walk on
the slopes of Hampstead the poet proposed,
and was accepted. One of the earliest results
of this engagement was to re-awaken in Coven-
try Patmore's bosom the determination to
devote himself seriously to poetical composi-
tion. This impulse did not take the form, so
common in youthful amorists, of accidental
lyrics illustrating moods of adoration and

38 Coventry Patmore

desire, but it quickened in him the determina-
tion to write very deliberately one great work of
art, which should exemplify and condense the
whole system of amatory experience. Imme-
diately after his betrothal, he announced to
Emily Andrews, " I have been meditating a
poem for you, but I am determined not to give
you anything I write unless it is the best thing
I have written. Oh, how much the best it
ought to be, if it would do justice to its
subject."

Between Coventry Patmore, however, and
almost all other poets of high distinction in
the history of literature, there was to be this
remarkable distinction, that while the rest have
celebrated the liberty, the freshness and the
delirium of love, whether in its physical or in
its metaphysical sense, but always rather in the
mood of anticipation than of possession, or, if
in that of possession, at least in a spirit which
feigns to ignore the bonds of custom, Patmore
alone is eagerly pleased to hug and gild those
bonds. He confesses himself not the poet of
passion in the abstract, but of love made a
willing captive by the marriage tie. It seems

Life in London 39

that he long had meditated over this theme,
and that he entered the wedded state, not
blindly and because there was no escape from
it, like most wild lovers, but deliberately and
eagerly, as one who could not regard love as
possible, or at least as a matter fit for imagina-
tive contemplation, until it was legalized by
the Church and the State. From his earliest
Protestant days he had unconsciously regarded
marriage as a sacrament, and into his poetical
commentary there entered, from the first, some
dim conception of a ritual. It is important to
realize this instinctive fact, before we meet
with any of those arguments founded upon
religion, which, later on, Patmore employed to
justify his view of life.

It seems to me valuable to insist, here at the
threshold of Coventry Patmore's life as a poet,
on the point that his transcendental adoration
of wedded love was originally neither a rule of
theology nor an argument of morals, but was a
symptom of purely individual lyricism. His
notion of Love in Marriage was not inculcated
by any priestly or puritanical scruple ; it
represented no coldness or reserve, no timidity

40 Coventry Patmore

or conventionality. On the contrary, it was a
fierce expression of personal instinct. It was
the peculiarity of Patmore's mind that the ex-
clusively aesthetic idea of marriage inflamed his
imagination with a noble excitement. He
saw no difference between marriage and poetry ;
the one was the subject of the other, the second
a necessary interpretation of the first. He
prepared for both in the same solemn spirit
which inspires the singing boys in the glorious
epithalamium of Catullus : —

Non facilis nobis, aequales, palma parata est ;
Adspicite, innuptae secum ut meditata requirunt.
Non frusta meditantur : habent memorabile quod sit.
Nee mirum : tota penitus quae mente laborent.

There was no reason, except poverty, which
both of them scorned, to keep Coventry Pat-
more and Emily Andrews apart. On Septem-
ber II, 1847, they were married at Hamp-
stead, and they went down to Hastings for the
honeymoon. More than thirty years later,
in writing Amelia^ Patmore's memory wandered
back across so much varied experience to the
emotion with which his first wife and he had
arrived at Hastings, and how

Life in Lo7taon 41

turning a dim street,
I first beheld the ocean ;

There, where the little, bright, surf-breathing town.
That shew'd me first her beauty and the sea,
Gathers its skirts against the gorse-lit down,
And scatters gardens o'er the southern lea.

The married life so felicitously begun was
carried through its course with exquisite
mutual devotion. But it closed with the death
of Emily Patmore in 1862, and after the lapse
of more than forty years there are few sur-
vivors who recall her with distinctness. Never-
theless, no woman of her period stands out for
us with greater definition. We know her to
have been of most striking, and at the same
time of most pleasing presence. Those who
met her for the first time were amazed by her
" strange beauty and extreme innocence of
countenance and manner." Tennyson, usually
a distracted observer, was immediately capti-
vated by her " splendid " appearance com-
bined with " so milk-maid-like an absence of
pretension." Ruskin and Carlyle were among
her outspoken admirers, and to the young
Preraphaelites her face was as that of a Muse.
Dignity of manner, more purity and force than

42 Coventry Patmore

actual sweetness, great nonchalance in anxious
and embarrassing moments, a sense of the
pomp of matronly ceremonial which bordered
on the excessive, combined with some lack of
humour, — these seem to be certain of the
social characteristics of Emily Patmore when
we strip them of the panegyrics of her dazzled
admirers. It was admitted that her beauty
ceased when she laughed. There were women
who complained that she was arrogant ; Mrs.
Carlyle accused her of trying to look like Wool-
ner's medallion of her. These were necessary
shadows in the light of her beautiful presence,
for even those whom she repelled admitted
that she was as radiant as she was pure and
good.

Emily Patmore became so completely her
husband's Egeria and ideal that it is important
for us to know what her appearance was. For-
tunately, we have unrivalled opportunity of
doing this, since three great artists, at the
height of their skill, have preserved her beauty
for us in the three spheres of painting, sculpture
and poetry. It is given to few women, in the
heyday of their youth, to be immortalized by

Life in London 43

such a trio as John Everett Millais, Thomas
Woohier and Robert Browning. The painting
by Millais, done in 185 1, is a rondo, extremely
vivid in colour and finished like one of Hol-
bein's small brilliant portraits at Basle. It
represents the subject in complete full face,
gazing out of the canvas with great brown eyes
under the heavy curtains of her voluminous
dark hair, which is drawn up in the curious
Early Victorian way so as to hide the ears. The
complexion is transparently hectic, with that
dangerous hue on the lips and cheeks which has
more of life than life itself should have. The
whole candid face and high-poised head
breathes an indomitable earnestness and purity.
One feels that this finely-coloured creature will
be living all for duty and the ideal. We turn
to the medallion of Woolner, also a head, and
also a rondo. This is a work in delicate low
relief, in exact profile. Here, in the absence
of Millais' gorgeous colour, we have form
insisted on, and we gain information on new
points, such as the bold arch of the nose, the
resolution of the little rounded chin. The
volume of the coiled hair is even more striking

44 Coventry Patmore

here than it was in the front face. In this sculp-
ture, the beauty of hue being abstracted,
the sense of positive charm is less than in the
painting, but there is added a greater strenu-
ousness of will, and further evidence of what
people call " force of character." This medal-
lion seems to have been modelled about the
same time as the Millais portrait was painted,
namely late in 185 1.

Finally, on October 11, 1852, Robert Brown-
ing tried his hand at a portrait of the same
remarkable model. The lines run thus in their
original form : —

If one could have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold

Such as the Tuscan's early art prefers !

No shade encroaching on the matchless mould

Of those two lips, that should be opening soft
In the pure profile — not as when she laughs,

For that spoils all — but rather as aloft
Some hyacinth she loves so leaned its staff's

Burden of honey-coloured studs to kiss

Or capture twixt the Ups, apart for this.

Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround.
How it should waver on the pale gold ground

Up to the fruit-shaped perfect chin it hfts 1

Such was the external appearance of Emily

Life in l^07ulon 45

Patmore in her brilliant youth, standing, in her
husband's later words,

Like a young apple tree, in flush'd array
Of white and ruddy flower, auroral, gay,

and so for fifteen years of unclouded felicity
she trod in the perfection of never-failing fresh-
ness the path of wife and mother. She died
too soon to have lost the mystery of youthful-
ness, and in her husband's memory she re-
mained to the last the transcendent type of
nuptial beauty. In the very shadow of her
death, all he could force himself to think about
was the adornments of her character. He was
absorbed, at that dark moment, by the circum-
stances of light itself, brooding not upon the
future but " upon all your patient, persistent
goodness, your absolutely flawless life, and all
your amiable and innocent graces."

Never, therefore, since the beginning of the
world, was a poet more happily situated in
relation to the personal bent of his genius than
Patmore was in his first married experience.
He had formed, as we have seen, a certain
exclusively aesthetic notion of marriage as a sac-

46 Coventry Patmore

rament. He possessed already the inward and
spiritual sense ; by an astonishingly good for-
tune, he now received in a perfectly harmonious
wife the outward and visible sign of grace. He
came into possession of what Hooker so subtly
calls " God's secrets, discovered to none but to
His own people." Uplifted by companionship
with this stately and kindly creature, daily
illuminated by her simplicity, he slowly gained,
not merely what seems a very profound insight
into the nature of womanhood, but the precise
experience which was needed to make him,
beyond all his peers, the consecrated laureate
of wedded love.

We may therefore, in this brief biography,
leave the slight outward incidents of Patmore's
career at this time unchronicled and deal
exclusively with his history as a poet, working
slowly — " in fruition," as he somewhere says,
" of the eternal novelty " of ideal marriage —
towards as perfect an expression as he could
obtain of those mysteries which are heavenly
at once and human. We have seen that his
earliest impulse was to compose for Emily
Andrews a poem which should be worthy of

Life in London 47

her, but Emily Andrews had to become Emily
Patmore before this particular poem could
receive adequate form and substance. The
first book of ^he Angel in the House took only-
six weeks in the writing, but, says the poet, " I
had thought of little else for several years
before." This statement must be accepted, of
course, with reserve. It means that the idea
of writing an authoritative poem in praise of
the solemnities of marriage was always present
during those years, but Patmore was earnestly
engaged on other work, in prose as well as in
verse. The most important incident in his
intellectual life at this time was, however, his
intimacy with the Preraphaelites.

The P.R.B., as it called itself, was founded
in the autumn of 1848, and early in the fol-
lowing year Thomas Woolner, the sculptor
of the Brotherhood, then some twenty-four
years of age, sought Patmore's acquaintance.
An ardent and impetuous young man, Wool-
ner was interested in verse-writing as well as
in modelling. He had accepted with avidity
the reforming ideas of his fellows, and like them
he was deeply enthusiastic about the art of

4 8 Coventry Patmo7''e

Tennyson. It would seem that Woolner intro-
duced into the Preraphaelite circle Patmore's
Poems oi 1844, and somewhat later (September
1849), he had the pleasure of presenting the
poet himself, an honoured guest, to D. G.
Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt. One of
the members of the inner Brotherhood has
recorded that from " 1849 to 1853 we all saw
a good deal of Mr. Patmore, and we all looked
up to him much for his performances in
poetry, his general intellectual insight and
maturity, and his knowledge of important
persons whom we came to know through him
— ^Tennyson in especial." In 1 85 1 Patmore
told Millais that he ought to keep a diary,
and the painter began one forthwith. It
was Patmore who, in the same year, induced
Ruskin to take up the cudgels for the Pre-
raphaelites and to write his famous letter
about Millais' pictures to The Times. Rossetti
speaks with the excitement of a boy of the
help which the superior age and prestige of
Patmore gave them in carrying out their
designs. To Patmore himself, who was
amused at finding youths of genius adopting

Life in London 49

to him the attitude which he adopted to
Tennyson, the ardent Preraphaelites seemed
" all very simple, pure-minded, ignorant and
confident."

The great scheme by which the young
friends hoped to impress their views upon a
dense and thankless world was now approach-
ing the hour of its evolution. The earliest
number of The Germ : Thoughts towards
Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art, since be-
come so famous and so rare, was issued in the
palest pink covers, in January 1850. Among
slightly elder persons who favoured and en-
couraged the project, none was so prominent
as Coventry Patmore, who invested it with
a motto of perfection, " It is the last rub
which polishes the mirror." To the first
number be contributed " The Seasons," and to
the February number a lyric in dialogue,
entitled " Stars and Moon," which was un-
signed and which he never claimed. This
poem, however, is not merely very characteris-
tic in its style, but it is the earliest specimen
existing of what may be called the Angel in
the House manner. It opens thus : —

4

50 Coventry Patmore

Beneath the stars and summer moon

A pair of wedded lovers walk.
Upon the stars and summer moon

They turn their happy eyes and talk :
" Those stars, that moon, for me they shine

With lovely, but no startling light ;
My joy is much, but not as thine,

A joy that fiUs the heart like fright,"

and it closes with the wife's exclamation : —

" Ah, love ! we both, vwth longing deep,
Love words and actions kind, which are
More good for life than bread or sleep,
More beautiful than Moon or Star."

The direct result of Patmore's confabula-
tions with Tennyson on the one hand, and
with Rossetti, Millais and Woolner on the
other, is seen in the volume called Tamerton
ChuTch-Tower and other Poems which Picker-
ing published for him in 1853. Nine years
had passed since the appearance of his first
volume, and much had happened in English
literature in the meantime. Tennyson had
published 7 he Princess in 1847, and In
Memoriam in 1850 ; Robert Browning, among
manv other works, had issued Dramatic
Romances in 1846 and Christmas Eve and
Easter Day in 1850 ; Elizabeth Browning

Life in London 5 1

had culminated, for the time being, in her
Casa Guidi Windows of 1851. Meanwhile, a
new poet of the first order — a poet welcomed,
by the way, in The Germ — had appeared in
the person of Matthew Arnold with the
Strayed Reveller of 1849 and the Empedocles
on Etna of 1852. These were the talents
with which Coventry Patmore was called
upon to compete, and their stimulus and
audacity were refreshing to his spirit. He
kept himself, however, independent of their
bias, and on his poetry of this period there is
scarcely any trace of contemporary influence.
Speaking of a time from 185 1 onwards. Dr.
Richard Garnett has recorded the subjects
of Patmore's intimate discourse. He was
glad to converse with younger men — himself
no veteran yet of a gravity beyond his years —
of " the subordination of parts of the whole, the
necessity of every part of a composition being
in keeping with all the others, the equal im-
portance of form with matter, absolute truth
to nature, sobriety in simile and metaphor,
the wisdom of retaining a reserve of power —
those and kindred maxims enforced with an

52 Coventry Patmore

emphasis most salutary to a young hearer
just beginning to write in the heyday of the
Spasmodic School." The distracting Li^e-
Drama of Alexander Smith, and, still more be-
wildering, the Balder of Sydney Dobell, being,
it may be added, the poetic portents of this
very dangerous and critical period. Mean-
while the attention of Patmore was being
given to the theories and practice of metrical
science, and he was examining with great
care the laws of verse.

When we turn from the records of his
conversation and his reading to the actual
pages of the volume of 1853 we are unable
to restrain a certain expression of surprise.
These pieces are not, at first sight, what we
should have expected to receive from so
serious and so learned a student of poetic
art. The poem which gives its name to the
book and occupies its first fifty pages, is a
strange sort of Coleridgean improvisation.
What we miss in its composition is precisely
that literary finish, that last polish given to
the mirror, of which we have been hearing so
much. " Tamerton Church Tower " is an

Life in Lo7tdon 53

experiment of the same class as so many which
we have since been made accustomed to by the
writers who call themselves " symbolists "
or " impressionists." It bears the appear-
ance, which may however be illusory, of
having been thrown ofif with extreme rapidity,
and Subjected to no revision, by a bard
desirous of producing an absolutely fresh
impression. Freshness is no doubt what it
precisely offered to its earliest admirers, for
there were critics who greatly admired
*' Tamerton Church Tower," and were even
dazzled by it. A skilful experiment is always
interesting, and novelty is itself a charm.
Neither newness nor boldness is wanting to
" Tamerton Church Tower," the main fault
of which is its extreme slightness. It is really
a record of three impressions of travel on the
borders of Devonshire and Cornwall. The
poet and his friend Frank ride from North
Tamerton (a village near Holsworthy) through
Tavistock to Plymouth, and are caught in a
thunderstorm. They celebrate, in mock-
heroics, the charms of Blanche and Bertha,
whom they are about to marry. The curtain

54 Coventry Patmore

falls, and rises on the couples already married ;
they go out in a boat on the Cornish coast,
are caught by another thunderstorm, are
wrecked, and Mrs. Blanche is drowned. The
curtain falls again, and rises on the widower
poet riding alone, accompanied by his sad
thoughts, from Plymouth through Tavistock
back to Tamerton.

It will be seen that the subject matter of
the poem is exiguous in the last degree, and
that its attractiveness depends entirely on the
treatment. In this the influence of the Pre-
raphaelite ideas is very strongly seen. Patmore
writes as the young Millais painted, and some-
times he produces an effect precisely similar —

In love with home, I rose and eyed

The rainy North ; but there
The distant hill-top, in its pride,

Adorn'd the brilliant air;

And as I pass'd from Tavistock

The scattered dwellings white.
The church, the golden weather-cock.

Were whelm'd in happy Ught.

Dark rocks shone forth with yellow brooms ;

And, over orchard walls,
Gleam'd congregated apple-blooms

In white and ruddy balls.

Life iit London 5 5

The children did the good sun greet

With song and senseless shout ;
The lambs did skip, the dams did bleat,

In Tavy leapt the trout.

Across a fleeting eastern cloud

The splendid rainbow sprang,
And larks, invisible and loud.

Within its zenith sang.

Perhaps the most felicitous quatrains are
those which describe " my uncle's daughter
Ruth " :—

A maid of fuUest heart she was ;

Her spirit's lovely flame
Nor dazzled nor surprised, because

It always burned the same ;

And in the heaven-lit path she trod

Fair was the wife foreshown,
A Mary in the house of God,

A Martha in her own.

This is Wordsworthian, but it is followed
by the eminently Patmorean stanza,

Gjrporeal charms she had ; but these
Were tranquil, grave and chaste,

And all too excellent to please
A rash, untutor'd taste.

From the old book of 1844 were restored
in 1853 "The River " and " The Woodman's

5 6 Coventry Pat7nore

Daughter," which last Millais made the
subject of an admirable painting. The metre
of these early pieces had been criticized by
Tennyson, and in some cases I think that
his hand is to be detected in the actual cor-
rections. " The Yew-Berry " is a powerful
study of amorous misunderstanding : —

I call this idle history the " Berry of the Yew ; "
Because there's nothing sweeter than its husk of scarlet glue,
And nothing half so bitter as its black core bitten through.

In " The Falcon " we have a lyrical ren-
dering of that story of Boccaccio which Tenny-
son was long afterwards to essay to dramatize.
*' Eros " is entirely charming ; no better speci-
men of Patmore's early manner can be quoted :

Bright thro' the valley gallops the brooklet ;

Over the welkin travels the cloud ;
Touch'd by the zephyr, dances the harebell ;

Cuckoo sits somewhere, singing so loud ;
Swift o'er the meadows glitter the starlings.

Striking their wdngs all the flock at a stroke ;
Under the chestnuts new bees are swarming,

Rising and falling like magical smoke :
Two little children, seeing and hearing.

Hand in hand wander, shout, laugh and sing :
Lo, in their bosoms, wild with the marvel,

Love, like the crocus, is come ere the Spring.

Liife ill LondoTi 57

Young men and women, noble and tender,

Yearn for each other, faith truly plight,
Promise to cherish, comfort and honour ;

Vow that makes duty one with delight.
Ah, but the glory, found in no story.

Radiance of Eden unquench'd by the Fall,
Few may remember, none may reveal it,

This the First-love, the first love of all.^

The main value of the volume of 1853,
which must be regarded as tentative and
provisional, consisted in its fine realism,
in its determination to see natural objects
through eyes that were clear and unclouded,
and in its consistent study of nuptial love,
more and more distinctly concentrated on
its sacramental aspect. It is therefore not
difficult to admit that the most important
numbers in the whole of the T amerton Church-
lower collection were " Honoria : Ladies'
Praise " and " Felix : Love's Apology," where
were presented framents of the great poem,
consecrated to marriage, which Patmore had
for so many years had under consideration.

^ The quotations from the Tamerton Church-Tower
volume are all given here from the first edition of 1853-
Patmore tinkered his early verses, and not always to their
advantage.

58 Coventry Patmore

It is interesting to observe that, after Tenny-
son, Carlyle seems to have been the first to
give full approbation to Coventry Patmore's
new departure in emotional poetry. He
found (June 7, 1853) in the Tamerton Church-
Tower volume " a great deal of fine poetic
light, and many excellent elements of valuable
human faculty." Patmore seems to have
chaffed him delicately on his supposed dislike
of the vehicle of verse ; Carlyle, surprisingly
amenable, recommends the poet to " go on,
and prosper, in what vehicle you find, after
due thought, to be the likeliest for you."
Ruskin thought the poems " a little too like
Tennyson to attract attention as they should.'*
The Brownings, " with old admiration for
your genius " still unabated, prayed for some
more unmistakable manifestation of it.
There was a general feeling that the volume
of 1853 was experimental, and that the poet
had something better up his sleeve.

Such was indeed the fact, and the time
was now fast approaching when he would
submit to the world a first instalment, at
least, of the masterpiece which he had been

Life i7i Lo72clon 59

so long preparing. The evidence as to the
precise date at which the great poem was
begun is conflicting ; Patmore himself, long
afterwards, at different times, made vague
and yet positive statements which cannot be
brought into line with one another. He
said that " the first book of the Angel in the
House took only six weeks in the writing,
though I had thought of little else for several
years before." This is partly confirmed by his
own remarkable confession in verse, which can-
not be too attentively noted. He wrote : —

Not careless of the gift of song,

Nor out of love wath noble fame,
I, meditating much and long

What I should sing, how win a name,
Considering well what theme unsung,

What reason worth the cost of rhyme,
Remains to loose the poet's tongue

In these last days, the dregs of time,
Learn that to me, though born so late,

There does, beyond desert, befall
(May my great fortune make me great !)

The first of themes, sung last of all.
In green and undiscovered ground.

Yet near where many others sing,
I have the very well-head found.

Whence gushes the Pierian Spring.

6o Coventry Patmore

Here we have almost exactly the attitude
of La Bruyere in his famous opening sentence
of the Caracteres, — " Tout est dit, et Ton
vient trop tard depuis plus de mille ans qu'il
y a des hommes, et qui pensent," — followed
by the instant proof that to the artist practi-
cally nothing has yet been said of what is
veritably best. It is plain that after re-
flecting long Patmore came to the conclusion
he could take the primal interests of mankind
and so treat them as to make them appear new,
that he might so celebrate Nuptial Love as
to make even married lovers feel that they
had never loved before. It seems to me
that immediately after his marriage in 1847 he
made spasmodic efforts to start his poem, but
only contrived, at that time, to produce the
" few astonishing lines " which he read in
1849 to Rossetti, Woolner and Millais. The
year 1850 appears to mark the date of the
practical commencement of The Angel in the
House. On March 21 of that year, Rossetti
writes : —

" [Patmore] has been occupied the last
month with his poem on Marriage, of which,

Liife in London 6i

however, he has not meanwhile written a line ;
but, having meditated the matter, is now
about to do so. He expresses himself quite
confident of being able to keep it up at the
same pitch as the few astonishing lines he
has yet written."

The poetical faculty of Coventry Patmore
was singularly fluctuating. He was not one
of those poets who can compose with com-
parative regularity, and be confident of pro-
ducing a fair number of lines every year.
His vein was extremely intermittent, and
if for short periods his verse would flow, as
Milton's did, " with a certain impetus and
oestrus^'' there were months and even years
when he was unable to make a single line.
But it was an admirable quality in his nature
that he could be perfectly patient. He said
to me, near the close of his career, that he was
thankful to know that he had never, from anxiety
or vanity, spurred an unwilling Pegasus. So
now, at the threshold of his great endeavour,
he felt no discouragement at the delay in
its performance ; he had, again like Mil-
ton, " an inward prompting which grew

62 Coventry Patmore

daily upon him, that by labour and intent
study he might perhaps leave something so
written to after times, as they should not
willingly let it die." And in this persuasion,
and with this faith, he was in no hurry ; he
could afford to be " long choosing " and
" beginning late."

What Patmore's conception of his subject
and his method of treating it were, have never
been stated in clearer terms than by Aubrey de
Vere in some recollections which he wrote down
at the request of Mr. Basil Champneys : —

" [Patmore] called upon me one day in a
state of unusual excitement and animation.
Its cause he did not care to conceal. There
was, he assured me, one particular theme for
Poetry, the more serious importance of which
had been singularly missed by most poets of
all countries, frequently as they had taken its
name in vain. That theme was Love : not a
mere caprice of fancy, or Love as, at best, a
mere imaginative Passion — but Love in the
deeper and softer sense of the word. The
Syren woman had been often sung. . . .
But that Love in which, as he affirmed,

Liife in London 63

all the Loves centre, and that Woman who is
the rightful sustainer of them all, the Inspira-
tion of Youth, and the Consolation of Age,
that Love and that Woman, he asserted,
had seldom been sung sincerely and effectually.
He had himself long since selected that theme
as the chief one of his poetry, but, often
as he had made the attempt, it had never suc-
ceeded to his judgment. . . . He had made one
attempt more and this time a successful one.
. . . His poem was already nearly finished."
Aubrey de Vere continues : " In a few
weeks more The Angel in the House appeared,"
but this is, I think, an error of memory.
From other documents, I gather that Pat-
more's visit to him, and the ensuing con-
versation, took place in the summer of 1850,
whereas the earliest part of the poem appeared
in 1854. '^^^ explanation of this delay seems
to be that although The Betrothal^ and
perhaps The Espousals, were practically
sketched out in 1850, their finish did not
satisfy a taste which was rapidly becoming
fastidious. Tennyson objected, and not with-
out reason, to the roughness of some of the

64 Coventry Patmore

stanzas. Meanwhile Patmore's inspiration
flagged again, and it was not until 1853 that
he seems to have contrived to fill up the
gaps in his structure, and give the whole
text its needful polish. Tennyson was satis-
fied at last, and said of The Betrothal, " You
have begun an immortal poem, and, if I am
no false prophet, it will not be long in winning
its way into the hearts of the people." Pat-
more appears to have been a little over-
excited at the immediate prospect of immor-
tality. He told D. G. Rossetti that he meant
to make The Angel in the House bigger than
the Divina Commedia. He hesitated to make
the plunge into publicity, and sent proof-sheets
of the first book beforehand to his friends
for their final censure. It was thus that
Tennyson read The Betrothal, " sitting on a
cliff close to the sea " in the Isle of Wight, in
the early summer of 1854, and told Aubrey de
Vere, as an unpublished letter from the latter
informs Patmore, that the poem, "when finished,
will add one more to the small list of Great
Poems." De Vere adds, on his own account,
** it is long since I read anything so beautiful.'*

Life in London 65

The very moment when his son was pre-
paring to give the pubHc a foretaste of his poem
was unluckily chosen by Peter George Patmore
for publishing a volume of not dull indeed,
but unmannerly and displeasing reminiscences,
entitled My Friends and Acquahitances. No-
thing could have been more ill-timed, for the
press rang with denunciation of the name of
Patmore. The poet determined to appear
under a pseudonym, and had actually printed
a title-page with the name C. K. Dighton upon
it, when he was dissuaded by the common
sense of Rossetti from such a piece of mystifi-
cation. The same eminently practical friend
(always so wise when another than himself was
the object of his interest) induced Patmore to
suppress " a marvellous note at the end, ac-
counting for some part of the poem being taken
out of his former book by some story of a
butterman and a piece of waste paper." At
last, in' October 1854, was published by J. W.
Parker & Son, an anonymous volume of 191
pages, entitled The Angel in the House : The
Betrothal. It may be said, at once, although
it takes us somewhat out of our biographical

S

66 Coventry Patmore

sequence, that this was followed in 1856 by
^he Espousals, a volume of not quite so many-
pages. A precious volume consisting of copies
of the 1854 ^^^ ^^5^ instalments of The Angel
in the House as altered and re-arranged by the
author for the second edition of his united
work, was presented to me by Patmore in 1884.
This valuable relic lies before me as I write,
and the alterations, all in the poet's beauti-
ful handwriting, are so very numerous that,
in many cases, for pages together, the MS.
entries exceed the print in bulk. In later
reissues Patmore was incessantly revising and
remoulding the text, so that to form a variorum
edition of The Angel in the House would be a task
before which the boldest bibliographer might
shrink. But the main radical changes were
made in 1857, and since then the poem has
been, in essential form, what it is to-day.

One change which must strike every reader
who studies the abundant alterations made
between 1854 and 1857, is a technical, or rather
a rhythmical, one. Tennyson had not ceased
to upbraid Patmore with his want of smooth-
ness ; he had said that some of his lines seemed

L>ife in L,ondo7t 67

" hammered up out of old nail-heads." When
Patmore, as a lad of seventeen, began to write
verses, he possessed, as we have had occasion
to note, a most defective ear. How far the
extraordinary eccentricities which mar his vol-
ume of 1844 were wilful or accidental we are
hardly in a position to decide, but to read many
of those early lyrics is like riding down a frozen
lane in a springless cart. He had his peculiar
theories of stress and accentuation, but I think,
also, that he had much in the Art of Poetry to
learn. When he came to compose The Be-
trothal in 1850, the lesson was already half
prepared, and we are safe in attributing the
increase in smoothness and felicity to the close
companionship with Tennyson which he had
been enjoying. But it was not until a still
later date that he gave his mind closely, for the
first time, to the study of English metrical law,
and the proofs of the result lie scattered broad-
cast over the pages of his MS. One example
will show this as well as a hundred. In 1854
he had printed : —

For thus I think, if any I see
Who falls short of my high desire,

68 Coventry Patmore

but this could not satisfy the fastidiousness of
1857, and it was changed to : —

For thus I think, if one I see
Who disappoints my high desire.

As every one knows, The Angel in the
House is written in a uniform measure of
alternate rhyming eights, the commonest metre
for humble hymns and ballads that has ever
been invented. Patmore was often attacked
by the critics for using this humdrum, jigging
measure, and he was once challenged to say why
he had chosen it. He replied that he did so of
set purpose, partly because at that particular
time the Brownings and even Tennyson, with
the Spasmodists in their wake, were diverging
into the most quaint and extravagant forms,
and he wished to call the public back to sim-
plicity ; but partly also because it was a swift
and jocund measure, full of laughter and gaiety,
suitable, not to pathetic themes, but to a song
of chaste love and fortunate marriage. No
doubt there is truth in this, and the simplicity
of Patmore's measure pleases us still while the
fantastic variety of his friend Woolner in
My Beautiful Lady (1863), ^ poem which once
threatened to be a serious rival to Patmore's,

Liife in London 69

has long ago become a weariness. That Pat-
more, as he used hotly to aver, did not neglect
the polishing and fashioning of his facile metre,
a comparison of the different texts amply proves.
But the alterations which he made were
of a far more radical kind than were involved
in mere rhythmical correction. He cancelled
long passages, added new ones, removed
stanzas from one part of the structure to
another, and almost in every case these bold
and essential changes were improvements.
There can be no question, and the point
is one of great interest in the career of a
poet, that in 1857 Patmore was in enjoyment
of a new flush of creative talent. There is
therefore a peculiar interest in what he wrote
at that time, and I do not scruple to print here
one or two fragments which occur in the MS.,
but which I cannot discover were then or have
ever since been printed. What whim con-
strained the poet finally to exclude this ex-
quisite little " epigram " with which he had
closed the seventh canto of his work ? —

" Rejoice evermore ! "
I err'd this day, O Lord, and am
Not worthy to be called Thy son ;

"JO Coventry Patmore

But if Thy will be, heavenly Lamb,

That I rejoice. Thy will be done !
Death I deserve ; I am yet in life ;

111 is my wage, Thou pay'st me good ;
These are my children, this my wdfe,

I feel the Spring, I taste my food.
Thy love exceeds, then, all my blame.

O grant me, since Thou grantest these,
Grace to put " Hallow'd be Thy name "

Before " Forgive my trespasses."

Still less reason does there seem to have been
for ultimately rejecting " Love of Loves " : —

" The man seeks first to please his vdfe,"

Declares, but not complains, Saint Paul ;
And other loves have little life

When she's not loved the most of all.
We cannot weigh or measure love,

And this excess, assure you well,
If sinful, is a sin whereof

Only the best are capable.

The close of the following brilliant and
highly characteristic section appears only in
the original draft of the poem. Mr. Basil
Champneys thinks that the excision of this
passage points to the fact that the sense of
it was not in accordance with Roman doc-
trine, Mr. Champneys takes occasion to give
an admirable definition of Patmore's peculiar

Life in London 7 1

view that " marriage, in its fullest fruition,
exalts rather than compromises essential purity,
so long as the partners to it preserved a sense
of its sacramental character, of its never-failing
freshness and mystery." This is unquestion-
ably true, but this was Patmore's creed after
as well as before his conversion, and to the end
of his life. The conversion, moreover, took
place in 1864, while this passage was cancelled
in 1857. We must look, I think, for some
other reason, probably a purely literary in-
stinct or caprice, for the disappearance of these
beautiful lines. As the poet composed them,
they should have come between " Love and
Honour " and " Valour Misdirected " : —

The Vestal Fire.
Virgins are they, before the Lord,

Whose hearts are pure ; " the vestal fire
Is not," so runs the Poet's word,

" By marriage quenched, but flames the higher " ;
Warm, living is the praise thereof ;

And wedded lives, which not belie
The honourable heart of love,

Are fountains of virginity.

One more epigram is far too delightful to
be lost : —

72 Coventry Patmore

NoTA Bene.
Wouldst thou my verse to thee should prove

How sw^eet love is ? When all is read,
Add " In divinity and love

What's worth the saying can't be said."

There is plenty of evidence of the great
seriousness with which Patmore composed and
revised all portions of The Angel in the
House. He did not regard it as a mere work
of entertainment, or even as an artistic ex-
periment, but as a task of deep social and
moral importance which he was called upon
to fulfil. This sense of the gravity of his
mission took, in 1854, a form which he pro-
ceeded immediately to reject, no doubt be-
cause the expression of his feeling, though
natural to himself, might strike a reader as
arrogant. The canto now called " The
Friends " was originally intended to begin with
these lines : —

May these my songs inaugurate

The day of a new chivalry,
Which shall not feel the mortal fate

Of fashion, chance or phantasy.
The ditties of the knightly time.

The deep-conceiving dreams of youth.
With sweet corroboration chime,

And I believe that love's the truth.

Life in London 73

The expression here might not be judicious
from the lips of a very young writer, but it was
essentially justified. The curates and the old
maids who were presently to buy the poems of
Patmore as the sweetest, safest sugar-plums of
the sheltered intellectual life, were themselves
responsible for the view they took of The
Angel in the House. They imagined the
grim and rather sinister author to be a kind of
sportive lambkin, with his tail tied in bows
of blue riband. But Patmore was a man of
the highest seriousness ; he aimed at nothing
less than an exposition of the divine mystery
of wedlock, and no reader should consider that
he has fathomed, or even dipped into, the real
subject of the poem, until he has mastered the
wonderful sections at the close, called " The
Wedding " and " The Amaranth." Here the
ideal of nuptial love is described and expatiated
upon, as perhaps by no other modern poet,
with the purity of a saint and the passion of a
flaming lover.

In the original draft, Vaughan, the supposed
writer of the poem, and his wife, confess that
they expect it to be cruelly handled by the
reviewers, but anticipate the consolation of

74 Coventry Patmore

a warm letter of praise from the Laureate.
Of this latter satisfaction, they were at
least certain ; we have seen that since 1846
Tennyson had been the nearest and the most
admired of Patmore's friends, and the in-
fluence of his comments and encouragements
is certainly marked in the texture of The
Angel in the House. But Patmore had
good reason to dread the cruelties of the
professional critics. His earlier volumes had
received abuse of a kind such as we can now
hardly conceive of. Blackwood^s Maga-
zine^ which had sent Keats " back to his
gallipots," had learned no lesson from the
passage of years ; it had called Patmore's
verses slime, " the spawn of frogs," and
" the ultimate terminus of poetical degra-
dation." It is only fair to say that, before
his death. Professor Wilson apologized for the
virulence of this disgusting article. Other
reviews, without being so offensive as this,
had been very disagreeable. In those days
a young poet had to fight for his place, and
the more original he was, the harder was the
struggle. On the whole, however, the recep-
tion of The Angel in the House was not unkind.

Life in London 75

The Athenceum^ it is true, published a very-
cruel article, which began as follows : —

" The gentle reader we apprize That this
new Angel in the House Contains a tale not
very wise About a Person and a Spouse. The
author, gentle as a lamb. Has managed his
rhymes to lit. And haply fancies he has writ
Another In Memoriam.''''

If this is read aloud, it will be seen to be a not
uningenious parody of the measure of the origi-
nal. The whole review was composed in this
form,andwastheworkofathennotorious musical
and literary critic, Henry Fothergill Chorley.

The breaking out of the Indian Mutiny
caused the poet to suspend for a year the pub-
lication of the revised and united Angel in the
House. But in 1858, after so many sorrows and
such a shedding of the nation's best blood in
Russia and in India, the public mind in England
was eager for domesticity and rest. The tender
purity of Patmore's poem, its direct appeal to
the primitive emotions of the heart, precisely
suited English feeling. The Angel in the House
began to sell in hundreds, then in thousands,
and it soon became the most popular poem of
the day.

76 Coventry Patmore

The author proceeded to expand it. In
i860 he published Faithful for Ever, in which
Frederick Graham, the rejected suitor of the
Angel, marries a woman not specially suited
to him, but one who, by dint of worthiness of
soul and a striving after higher things, becomes
a helpmeet in the best sense. It cannot be
said that this theme lends itself well to poetry,
and the form Patmore now adopted, that of
letters in octosyllabic rhyme passing between
the characters, was ill adapted to his purpose.
Faithful for Ever was soon melted into its
successor, The Victories of Love, and it is now
by no means easy to detach it from the general
texture of the whole. All this time the health
of Emily Patmore had been steadily undermined
by consumption. On July 5, 1862, she passed
away, and the Angel in the House was buried
in Hendon churchyard. Whether or not the
final section of his poem. The Victories of
Love, in which the pathetic parting of married
lovers is dwelt upon with exquisite tenderness,
was written before the death of Emily Pat-
more, appears to be doubtful, but the dates
suggest that it was largely composed in pre-
monition of that event. Without dwelling

Liife in London 77

on so private and so delicate a subject, there
can be no indiscretion now in saying that
certain of the most poignant odes in Unknown
Eros embalm memories and episodes of this
long-drawn, sad farewell. The Victories of
Love was composed in a vein more resigned
if not less ardent, and in the sermon near the
close of it Patmore distinctly prophesied of
those psychological mysteries to which, under
the influence of his second marriage, his
intellect was to submit itself so freely.

It is worth noting that The Victories of Love
appeared, in 1862, in successive numbers of
Macmillan's Magazitie, where they must have
greatly surprised the readers of that periodical,
utterly unaccustomed to so strange a sort of
serial. But I am told by Dr. Garnett that the
offer of ;^ioo for this use in the magazine was
gladly accepted by Patmore, who was some-
what overborne by the expenses of his wife's
long illness. In the next year The Victories
of Love appeared as a small volume, and in
course of time, having long swallowed up
Faithful for Ever, it has itself been absorbed in
the general text of The Angel in the House.

Chapter III

" THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE "

AMONG the poets of the Preraphaelite
school, with whom Patmore was
associated when he was writing The
Angel in the House, freshness of impression to the
eye and ear was aimed at by a great solicitude
for ingenuous verse-efTects. In the case of
D. G. Rossetti the metrical simplicity of poems
like " The Blessed Damozel " and " Jenny " is
found contrasted with delicate inventions such
as we meet within "Love's Nocturn" and " First
Love Remembered." Morris had cultivated
terza rima in " The Defence of Guinevere,"
curious choral forms of a mediaeval kind in
" The Chapel in Lyoness," and in " Rapun-
zel," and strange arrangement of rhymes in his
refrained ballads. In the poem which is
almost the only direct attempt to rival The
Angel in the House, Woolner's My Beautiful
Lady, each canto is composed in a different
metre, and some of the stanzaic forms are as

78

" The Angel in the House " 79

elaborate and artificial as those used in the
seventeenth century by the school of George
Herbert. In the face of this general tendency
to consider metrical variety and originality
essential, we have seen that Patmore composed
his great work in a measure of the most hum-
drum simplicity. The " modest and unpre-
tentious " metre which he chose was that
of the rhymed octosyllabic quatrain.

In advancing years, Patmore became very
sensitive to criticism of the vehicle which he
had adopted. He resented extremely the
charge which was occasionally brought against
the movement of The Angel in the House that
it was " garrulous " and " prattling." He
stated in the strongest terms that it was with
deliberation, and in order to secure certain
effects which thereby he did secure, that he
had chosen what he thought a gay and jocund
measure, peculiarly well adapted to celebrate
the joys of marriage. He thought the exaggera-
tions of metrical display, to which our romantic
poets have constantly been prone, vulgar and
ugly, and the employment of them likely to
disgust the reader with a theme of any inherent

8o Coventry Patmore

delicacy. In his Essay on English Metrical Law,
which was printed in 1856, he adroitly justifies
the use which he had just been making of the
common eight-syllable quatrain by describing
it as " a measure particularly recommended by
the early critics, and continually chosen by
poets in all times, for erotic poetry, on account
of its joyous air." These statements, as well as
the observation that it owes its " unusual
rapidity of movement " to the fact that it is
acatalectic, or existing in a state of breathless
continuity, may be contested, and were at once
challenged by Tennyson. But the interesting
point is the proof this passage gives us of the
mode in which Patmore regarded the metre
which he had chosen.

He was alive to the danger of losing himself
in a narrative which, however momentous to
himself, might seem vapid and trivial to his
readers. As a matter of fact, the actual story
of The Angel in the House is of a nature similar
to those told in exactly contemporary novels,
such as Barchester Towers and The Daisy Chain.
The first thing it was essential for Patmore to
do was to replace an element of realistic enter-

Emily Augusta Patmore.

From a Portrait by Sir John E. J/i/t'afs, P.R.A. (iS5')-

[Reproduced from Mr. Basil Cliamimeys' "Coventry Pat-
more" by kind permissinn of Me---;r-i. Geo. I'.ell S: Sons.J

" The Angel in the House " 8 i

tainment, in the supply of which he could not
hope to compete with Miss Yonge and Anthony
TroUope, by delicate ingenuities of art and by
a strain of consistent philosophy. The structure
of The Angel in the House is ingenious, and far
more elaborate than the casual reader suspects.
The poem proper is fronted by a Prologue, and
is divided into two books, each book containing
twelve cantos, each canto being subdivided into
a prelude, a segment of narrative, and certain
epigrams or epilogues which are independent
of the story. It must be remembered that we
possess but a portion of the work, which in the
early fifties was, as D. G. Rossetti reports,
intended to be bigger than the Divina Corn-
media. Had Patmore carried out this scheme,
the recurrence of motifs throughout would
have been still more marked than it is, and
the concinnity of the poem as a work of art
still more apparent. The " preludes " would
then have been seen to form a poem in them-
selves, a philosophical setting, of which faith
transfigured in love was the theme and the
inspiration.

The subject of The Angel in the House

6

8 2 Coventry Patmore

was one which was generally misunderstood
even by those who fell most directly under
its charm. The poem was, primarily and
obviously, a breviary for lovers, and in this
capacity no subtlety was needed to compre-
hend it. It pleased all women and many men,
and those who traced in it the echo of their
own sentiments did not trouble themselves to
inquire whether the poet had any deeper
meaning than appeared upon the surface of his
work. Youths and maidens liked to recognize
their own flushed and dreamy faces reflected
upon a mirror so flattering and so limpid. Such
readers saw that the poem was simple, and they
rejoiced in its simplicity without troubling
themselves to realize that the writer of it was
complicated. The effect of the poem on a very
large number of persons who had not up to that
time been captured by the spell of poetry was
very extraordinary. The Angel in the House
performed a work of imaginative conciliation ;
it brought into the fold of lovers of literature
a vast number of young men and women who
had hitherto been utterly recalcitrant to the
charm of verse. These readers discovered that

" The Angel in the House " 83

the instincts which they had experienced in
silence, with an abashed acquiescence in the
conviction that they could never be put into
words, were here actually interpreted in
language of great sweetness and melody, and
treated as matters of high public importance.
The subject of Patmore's poem was singu-
larly original. The general tendency of the
time was to a certain lawlessness in the treat-
ment of sexual passion. A wholesome reaction
against the timid and commonplace conceal-
ment of the enormous part that sex takes in
the whole comity of man was expressing itself
more or less rebelliously, with more or less
juvenile exaggeration. A great poet, the
contemporary of Patmore, had gone so far as
to denounce, with scorn and hatred, those who
wish aux choses de Vamour meler Vhonnetete.
There would seem to be absolutely nothing
in common between Baudelaire and the
English poet who more than any other has
celebrated Vhonnetete in love ; but there is this,
their intense preoccupation with the problem
of sex. The illustrious Frenchman, to use a
familiar image, approached the subject as the

84 Coventry Patmore

poacher, Patmore as the gamekeeper, and the
great originality of the latter consists in the
boldness with which he has accepted marriage,
which almost all other poets had treated as
either the enemy or the conclusion of love, as
being its very object and summit. What is
not instantly observed is that to Patmore,
within the pale of the mysterious sacrament of
marriage, no less psychological ingenuity is
possible than to Baudelaire outside it. A very
curious instance of this freedom is to be found
in the sympathy which Patmore felt for the
boudoir-novelists of the eighteenth century. I
recollect, in 1881, a most interesting conversa-
tion with him about Les Matinees de Cythere
of Crebillon fils^ in the course of which he
maintained, paradoxically, that such books were
not corrupt though they might be dangerous,
that they contained most valuable analyses of
the human heart, and that their sentimental
refinements were a tribute to the species of
occult divinity of which their excesses were
powerless to deprive their theme.

The plan of The Angel in the House supposed
that a modern poet, named Vaughan, while

" The A?igel 172 the House " 85

walking through the fields with his wife on
the eighth anniversary of their wedding-day,
divulged to her the secret that he intended to
compose a poem of a perfectly new class.

The wife, not versed in the history of litera-
ture, supposes this to be either the life of King
Arthur or the Fall of Jerusalem, but Vaughan
corrects her : —

Neither : your gentle self, my wife,
And love, that grows from one to all.

He is a slow writer, however, and it is not
until a year later that he hands her, on their
ninth wedding-day, " his leisure's labour ' Book
the First.' " This external myth, which recurs
at distant intervals, was doubtless designed to
prevent, what always annoyed Patmore by its
ineptitude, the identification of himself and
his first wife with the hero and heroine of the
poem. But before we start the story, we have
in the preludes to the " Cathedral Close," the
key-note struck of the theme and temper of
what is to follow : —

Thou Primal Love, who grantest wings
And voices to the woodland birds,

Grant me the power of saying things

Too simple and too sweet for words . . .

86 Coventry Patmore

The richest realm of all the earth
Is counted still a heathen land :
Lo ! I, like Joshua, now go forth
'• ' To give it into Israel's hand.

Leaving us still somewhat uncertain as to
the actual latitude and longitude of this
mysterious realm, the poet pauses no longer but
starts his story : In the Close of Sarum, Dean
Churchill, a widower, brings up in a stately and
evangelical decorum, three lovely daughters,
Honoria, Mildred and Mary. When Vaughan,
still " a rude boy," had been intimate with
the family, six years before, the girls were
prigs and prudes. He sees them again, and is
overwhelmed by the charm of their mellowing
graces. His age, his temperament, his oppor-
tunity, alike combine to concentrate all his
nature on the pursuit of feminine beauty, and
the poet well paints the egotism of the in-
stinctive lover, who could adore all the sisters,
or any one of the three, being at first blindly
and foolishly subdued to the general fascination
of them all. In this condition, delicately poly-
gamous and universally enflamed, he pours
forth a sort of canticle which is one of the

" The Angel in the House ^"^ 87

most subtly original and at the same time one
of the most felicitous passages in the whole of
Patmore's poetry. It must be quoted in its
entirety : —

Whene'er I come where ladies are,

How sad soever I was before,
Though like a ship frost-bound and far

Withheld in ice from the ocean's roar,
Third-winter'd in that dreadful dock,

With stiffen'd cordage, sails decay'd.
And crew that care for calm and shock

Alike, too dull to be dismay'd.
Yet, if I come where ladies are.

How sad soever I was before.
Then is my sadness banish'd far.

And I am like that ship no more ;
Or, like that ship if the ice-field splits,

Burst by the sudden polar Spring,
And all thank God for their warming vdts.

And kiss each other and dance and sing.
And hoist fresh sails, that make the breeze

Blow them along the liquid sea.
Out of the North, where Hfe did freeze,

Into the haven where they would be.

(The reader will not fail to notice the
anapaestic movements introduced here into the
humdrum measure, with the symbolic purpose
of illustrating the pulse and glow of life in its
new vague impulse.) Vaughan is now in that

8 8 Coventry Patmore

very dangerous state in which the heart, having
got the habit of loving, is ready to be set on
fire bv every spark of beauty. Fortunately, the
clouds of roseate radiance promptly clear
away, and he sees Honoria, like Venus in the
boscages of Ida, obviously and unquestionably
sweeter than her sisters. There is no sign, for
a while, that his suit is to be encouraged, and
he dies a thousand deaths of fantastic agony in
his impatience. Here Patmore is extremely
skilful in showing what the effect of love is
upon the young man's nature. This new-born
passion, concentrated at last in timid worship
upon Honoria, tends to the mysterious exalta-
tion of his whole being : —

His merits in her presence grow,
To match the promise in her eyes,

And round her happy footsteps blow
The authentic airs of Paradise.

Her presence, in short, and the complex
emotions which she awakens in him, reveal to
him his own power to feel, his very heart, and
even the material amplitude of the universe.
In this exaltation, the incongruities of social
existence fade away to nothingness ; they are

" The Angel i7i the House ^^ 89

burned up in the fire of feeling ; and the
same transcendent rapture clothes the arti-
fice of life at the Close of Sarum as to a different
class of lover covers the abandonment of
savage womanhood on the reefs of Tahiti or in
the woodlands of Ceylon. The accidents of
civilized life — a respectable house, elegant
clothes, the amenities of a reformed (and
endowed) religion, all the comfortable and
absurd prose of contemporary middle-class
felicity — are transfigured by the delirium of the
sexual instinct. The cleverness of Patmore
in dwelling upon all this, which every one had
vaguely felt, but which no one had ever been
willing to record, is positively astonishing. He
paints the flush and rainbow of young love in
all its exquisite fatuity, yet without slipping into
the ridiculous. What, for instance, could be
more ingenious than Vaughan's philosophical
rhapsody about Clothes ? The young Churchill
ladies appear freshly dressed for an archery
party. We see them in our mind's eye, with
the bright silks drawn over enormous crino-
lines, revealing the short lilac gloves, and the
neat balmorals below. Nothing, it would seem,

90 Coventry Patmore

could be more respectable, and nothing more
odious to the Muses. Nothing less amenable
to the sway of Eros, that great god, naked and
terrible. There are types and images of beauty,
justified by the tradition of poetry and paint-
ing, which demand, surely, that the lover
should avert his eyes from these ballooning
crinolines ?

No ! that eclecticism will suffice for literature
and art, but life is differently constituted. The
attraction of pure sexual instinct cuts through
all such conventions, and Vaughan learns, as
the most delicate poet of antiquity learned be-
fore him, nescit amor -priscis cedere imaginibus.
The Churchill ladies start in all their modest
finery for the garden-party, and this is how
their dresses are transfigured : —

Boon Nature to the woman bows ;

She walks in earth's whole glory clad,
And, chiefest for herself of shows.

All others help her, and are glad :
No splendour 'neath the sky's proud dome

But serves for her familiar wear ;
The far-fetch'd diamond finds its home

Flashing and smouldering in her hair ;
For her the seas'their pearls reveal ;

" The Angel in the House " 91

Art and strange lands her pomp supply
With purple, chrome and cochineal,

Ochre, and lapis lazuli ;
The worm its golden woof presents ;

Whatever runs, flies, dives or delves,
AH doff for her their ornaments

Which suit her better than themselves ;
And all, by this their power to give.

Proving her right to take, proclaim
Her beauty's clear prerogative

To profit so by Eden's blame.

The story, if story it can be called, now
pursues its innocuous course. Vaughan is of
good birth, sufficient wealth and agreeable
features ; the match is one in which the
widowed Dean has no excuse for delaying to
acquiesce. The course of love flows as smoothly
as the sleepy river of Avon among its water-
lilies. The young man suffers a few suitable
and necessary delays, during the course of
which he abandons himself to agonies of fear,
and then is invited, at his own request, to
discuss some " business," to the Deanery to
dinner. The ladies rise and leave to their
" tasteless wine " the elder and the younger
gentleman. The Dean talks about the British
Association, about antiquities at Abury : — ^

92 Coventry Patmore

Last,
He hoped the business was not bad

I came about : then the wine pass'd.
A full glass prefaced my reply :

I loved his daughter, Honor ; I told
My estates and prospects ; might I try

To win her ? At my words so bold
My sick heart sank.

Ah ! si jeunesse savait ! the Dean, only too
delighted, gives his glad consent at once. It
was these narrative graces, so curiously in the
exact taste of the time, which made The Angel
in the House a direct rival to the guileless
domestic romances of 1850.

Patmore was highly sensitive to the criticism
which was sometimes directed to this portion
of his work. Such lines as : —

" Look, is not this a pretty shawl,
' Aunt's parting gift ? " " She's always kind."
" The new wing spoils Sir John's old Hall ;
You'll see it, if you pull the blind,"

or, still worse, from The Victories of Love —

" Also, I thank you for the frocks
And shoes for baby. I (D.V.)
Shall wean him soon,"

represented a strong desire on the poet's part

" The Angel in the House ^^ 93

to eschew all rhetoric, and to produce a per-
fectly faithful impression. In some cases,
happier than these, he succeeds, but too often
he fails to be distinguished. It is extremely
difhcult to say where success ends and failure
abruptly begins in these cases. The instinct
for style is a delicate thing, and it sometimes
preserves Robert Browning while it abandons
Elizabeth Barrett, or takes Tennyson smoothly
over reefs upon which Patmore strikes. The
fact remains that the story of The Angel in
the House, which was that which attracted to
it at first tens of thousands of readers who
cared little for poetry, is now to be neglected.
What arrests our attention is the lyrical psy-
chology of the " preludes " and epilogues which
form the setting of each canto.

The philosophical interest of the poem
becomes lively at the point where an ordinary
love-tale becomes dull, namely, when the
lover is accepted. At this juncture the poet
draws aside for a moment to make a personal
confession : —

How vilely 'twere to misdeserve
The poet's gift of perfect speech,

94 Coventry Patmore

In song to try, with trembling nerve,

The limits of its utmost reach,
Only to sound the wretched praise

Of what to-morrow shall not be ;
So mocking with immortal bays

The cross-bones of mortality !
I do not thus.

And in his close study of enchanted instinct,
he does not forget that this passion of betrothal
is the preparation for a great and holy sacra-
ment. What thrills the lover with so bewilder-
ing a sweetness that he seems translated into
a new sphere, is the ecstasy of feeling that he
loves on earth as the blessed love in heaven.
In describing the strange violence of this
illusion, which is purely a matter of sexual
instinct at base, but which suggestion dyes
with all the colours of spiritual romance,
Patmore attains a rare precision of insight.
Shakespeare has scarcely surpassed this close and
sympathetic observation of that mystery of
erotic infatuation which invades and over-
whelms the spirit of a pure and ardent in-
amorato—

How strange a thing a lover seems
To animals that do not love !

Lo ! where he walks and talks in dreams.

" The Angel in the House'' 95

And flouts us with his Lady's glove ;
How foreign is the garb he wears ;

And how his great devotion mocks
Our poor propriety and scares .'I

The undevout with paradox !
His soul, through scorn of worldly care,

And great extremes of sweet and gall.
And musing much on all that's fair,

Grows witty and fantastical . . .
He blames her, though she has no fault.

Except the folly to be his ;
He worships her, the more to exalt

The profanation of a kiss ;
Health's his disease ; he's never well

But when his paleness shames her rose ;
His faith's a rock-built citadel.

Its sign a flag that each way blows ;
His o'er-fed fancy frets and fumes ;

And Love, in him, is fierce, like Hate,
And ruffles its ambrosial plumes

Against the bars of time and fate.

The harlequin passion which invades him
occupies every corner of his heart and distracts
all the pov^^ers of his will. It upsets every
rule of logic, and makes it a postulate that in
love the part is greater than the whole. The
entire world passes into vagueness and dimness,
and the crystal atmosphere in which the be-
loved object seems to walk concentrates upon

g6 Coventry Patmore

itself all the radiance and all the reality of the
universe. In this condition, the lover walks
in a trance and is so far removed from the
moods and interests of other human beings that
it is only by a sort of theatrical effort that he
pursues his mortal course from day to day,
as an actor not as a real protagonist in life.
Cowley, another very learned lover, had
observed this lunacy of the infatuated, and
in a lucid moment had cried out : —

I wonder what the Grave and Wise

Think of all us that love !
Whether our pretty Fooleries

Their Mirth or Anger move ;
They understand not Breath, that Words do want ;
Our Sighs to them are insignificant.

But Patmore does not consent, even in
irony, to call the mysterious movements of the
lover " fooleries." He looks upon them as
inevitable symptoms of the vast change which
is taking place, and a great originality is
shown in his analysis of the beneficial effect
which the passion, so oddly initiated, gradually
has upon the nature of both lovers. It must
not be overlooked that, in The Angel in the
Housey Patmore is careful to present to us two

" The Angel in the House'' 97

hearts which are fresh, not worn or stale,
both still wholly virginal in their simple
delectation. He dwells on the mystic purpose
of this sexual attraction which he paints so
clearly, with so little taint of false modesty.
He shows the general benefit to mankind which
accrues from the accelerated vigour of the
individual, and he does not pretend to mini-
mize the egotism of the lovers. He admits that
their very sacrifices are egotistical. But he
revels in praise of the new courage which
comes to them from a consciousness of the
inviolable fidelity of their mutual desires, and
he launches his ideal couple upon

Love's living sea by coasts uncurb'd,
Its depth, its mystery and its might,

Its indignation if disturb'd,

The glittering peace of its delight.

The careful reader of The Angel in the
Housey and especially of the brilliant and
elaborate section entitled " The Espousals,"
will note with admiration the skill with which
Patmore develops the progress of the passion.
What is apt to seem a flash of fire to the
participants, and a pause of unrelieved tedium

7

98 Coventry Patmore

to the bystander, is perceived by the poet to
have a logical evolution of its own. He dwells
with chaste rapture on the joys which are the
prelude to that mystery of immaculate indul-
gence which was the aim of his vision. Here
he was at one with the amorous mystics of the
poetic literature of all time, with the authors
of The Song of Songs, and of the Pervigilium
Veneris, and of the Roman de la Rose. At his
highest — as for instance, in the long section
called " The Abdication," — which cannot be
examined here at length, but should be care-
fully studied — Patmore is with these poets at
their best.

An unpublished letter from Carlyle, which
lies before me as I write this page, shows that
he at least was not blind to the extraordinary
elevation of this new species of erotic poetry.
Writing from " Gill, Cummertrees, Arran,"
in 1856, immediately after the publication of
The Espousals, Carlyle says : —

" I brought it with me into these parts, the
only modern book I took the trouble with.
Certainly it is a beautiful little piece ; high,
ingenious, fine. The delineation of the thing

" The Aiigel in the House " 99

is managed with great art, thrift, and success
... I have to own the whole thing is an ideal ;
soars high above reality, and leaves mud of
fact {mud with whatever stepping stones may
be discoverable there) lying far under its foot."

The veteran Walter Savage Landor wel-
comed the same volume in terms which were
still more appropriate. " Never," he wrote,
" was anything more tender ... I rejoice to
find that Poetry has come out again safe, and
that Love has dipt his wings and cooled his
tender feet in our own pure streams." And
Emerson wrote, " I give you joy and thanks as
the 'maker of this beautiful poem.' "

The philosophy of The Angel in the House,
however, cannot be appreciated unless we recog-
nize that Patmore loathed and rejected the
scholastic theory that marriage is nothing but a
remedium amoris, a compromise with frailty, a
best way of getting out of a bad business. On
the contrary, he regarded it as a consecration
of the highest human virtue, and he held that
the more exquisite is the goodness which is per-
ceived, or imagined, in each loved one by the
other, the more perfect will be the marriage,

lOO Coventry Patmore

and more firmly based on reverence and hope.
It is amusing to record that when he became
a Catholic, Patmore was for some time un-
certain whether or no to reconcile The Angel
in the House with Roman doctrine. At first he
thought he could not do so, and he withdrew
the volumes from circulation. Then he was
persuaded that their teaching received a
radiant justification in the tenets of the
Church, and he resumed his satisfaction in
them. But, as a matter of fact, the question
was one neither of theology nor of logic, but
of individual lyricism. The Angel in the House
is a purely aesthetic observation of a certain
phase of life, conceived in the intoxicating
light of imagination. This phase of life is so
important that all others may be said to
depend upon it, yet from the majority of
mankind it has received nothing but ridicule
or neglect. It is Patmore's great claim upon
our respect that he has perceived its dignity
and recorded its phases.

chapter IV

HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL

(i 862-1 870)

THE success of The Angel in the House
was not immediate with the general
public. The poem was anonymous,
and there seems to be a reluctance on the part
of readers of poetry to accept verse which is not
made personally attractive by the name of its
author. The earliest instalment, The Betrothal
(1854), ^^^ fairly well received by the press, but
The Espousals (1856) was at first met by total
silence, the most repulsive form of attack
known to the sensitive race of poets. To be
spoken ill of is painful enough, but not to be
spoken of at all is a thousand times more dis-
tressing. " Resolving not to die of dignity,"
however, Patmore wrote to Henry Reeve asking
him to neutralize in the Edinburgh Review the
neglect of the rest of the press, but it was not
until 1858 that an admirable article by Aubrey
de Vere greeted in that powerful organ the
completed edition of the first part of The Angel

101

I o 2 Coventry Patmore

in the House. By this time the poem had been
reprinted, and admired, in America, and trans-
atlantic praise reverberated advantageously in
the London book-shops. The work which,
under the general title, now became so popular,
was, as must be carefully insisted on, the united
and almost re-written Betrothal and Espousals.
But this was but a third of the poem as
Patmore planned it. These two parts were to
have been followed by four others, two of
which, Faithful for Ever (i860), and Victories
of Love (1863) actually appeared, as has been
already reported. Mr. Basil Champneys sur-
mises that, after the death of his first wife,
" Patmore had not the heart to complete the
scheme, which apparently contemplated giving
in greater detail the subsequent life of Felix
and Honoria." It is doubtful whether he
would have recovered a freshness of treatment,
which to most of his readers seems to flag with
the opening of Faithful for Ever. It is no argu-
ment in favour of The Victories of Love that its
author continued to prefer it to The Betrothal^
since writers almost invariably love best their
least beautiful productions. The question of

Hampstead and Heron s Ghyll 103

the development of style in the whole poem has
already been touched upon. It is enough here
to say that the public unquestionably accepted
the two later sections as a pleasant narrative
in verse tacked on to their genuine favourite,
the history of Felix and Honoria, but it has
always been to the two earlier sections thit
the great success of the work has been attached.
What that success amounted to, it may be
as well to state here, although it belongs in its
fullness to a much later period of Patmore's
history than we have yet reached. It began in
1863 when the two-volume edition, including
The Victories of Love, for the first time gave
the general public a uniform text of their
favourite work. Long before this, the praises of
Tennyson and Carlyle, of Ruskin and Rossetti,
of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, had given
the author all the encouragement and joy that
a poet in his youth could long for. The circle
like that created by a pebble thrown into a
pool, vibrated more and more widely, with
less intensity but with greater scope, and in a
very short time 7he Angel in the House became
the most popular poetical work of the genera-

1 04 Coventry Patmore

tion. It was, for a while, the solitary success-
ful rival of Tennyson's successive publications,
competing without difficulty with The Idylls
of the King, and with Enoch Arden.

Among the best critics this popular success was
itself a danger, and it was the exorbitant prefer-
ence of readers for such innocent and idyllic
verse that led to the attacks which were directed
against Tennyson and Patmore alike during the
revolutionary period which followed the publi-
cation of Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads in
1866. It may be said that it was from 1854 to
1864 that the fame of Patmore, as the poet of
The Angel in the House, was most prevalent
with the critics. Up to this time, he was not
a popular poet, but he was praised with the
greatest enthusiasm by those who were accepted
as judges. After this, for some fifteen years,
he fell into critical desuetude, and was the
object of very sarcastic and often very unjust
animadversions ; but the public did not follow
the critics. Just about the time when their
reviews began to tell them not to admire The
Angel in the House, readers found that they had
formed a passion for it, and the popularity of

Hampstead and Heron s Ghyll 105

the book steadily increased. At the time of
Patmore's death, it was found that the total
sale had exceeded a quarter of a million copies.
This result was due, of course, mainly to
the eminently attractive nature of the senti-
ment revealed in the poem. But several of
Patmore's friends, by ardent and generous
partisanship, vastly accelerated the apprecia-
tion of educated readers. Among such friends,
the leading position was taken by Ruskin, who
overlooked no opportunity, whether in public
or in private, of enlarging Patmore's circle of
admirers. In i860, when the poet had been
the victim of some particularly unintelligent
piece of reviewers' folly, Ruskin seized the
occasion to make a sort of public confession of
faith in the genius of his friend. He wrote, in
a famous letter : — " I am bound to express
my obligation to Mr. Patmore, as one of my
severest models and tutors in the use of English,
and my respect for him as one of the truest and
tenderest thinkers who have ever illustrated
the most important, because commonest, states
of human life." All through this period, from
The Elements of Drawing of 1857 to Sesame

io6 Coventry Patmore

and Lilies in 1865, when Ruskin's support was
most valuable in consideration of Ms vast and
docile circle of disciples, he never hesitated to
give it to the poet whom he admired and
esteemed so highly. He quoted and praised
The Angel in the House in his lectures ; he
recommended it to the enthusiastic clubs and
coteries that begged him for advice. Ruskin
never shifted his allegiance ; the first time he
read The Betrothal he said that the complete
work " ought to become one of the most
blessedly popular books in the language," and
he consistently did what he could to hasten
on this pleasant consummation.

On July 5, 1862, in a little house which they
were renting at Hampstead, Emily Patmore
died after a long illness. This event formed a
crisis in the career of her husband, and some-
thing of a changed view both of life and
literature appears in his diary and his letters
from this moment. He had become absorbed
in and as it were transmuted by her presence.
It was with reluctance that he left her for a
few hours each day, and with violent emotions
of home-sickness he went straight back to her

Hampstead and Heron 5 Ghyll 107

as soon as his duties permitted his return.
" Her kind and wise mind ; her wifely love,
which acutely felt every variation of my
irregular moods, yet never showed any impa-
tience ; her honest heart, which instantly dis-
cerned the right in every moral question ;
her lofty simplicity," these were traits to
which he never became accustomed, but which
held their lustre freshly for him to the last.
In terms of admirable felicity, he had noted
that : —

An idle poet, here and there,

Looks round him ; but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair.

Is duller than a witling's jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each ;

They lift their heavy lids, and look ;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,

They read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme,

And most forget : but, either way.
That and the Child's unheeded dream

Is all the light of all their day.

In this mellow light Patmore had lived for
fifteen years, always conscious of its radiance,
not forgetting, not blaspheming, never failing
to give thanks. There was but one source of

io8 Coventry Patmore

possible division between him and his wife, and
that had not become a serious one when she
was taken from him. More precisely, perhaps,
it should be said that it had only just become
serious. Emily Patmore " had been terrified
from her cradle with the hideous phantom
which Puritanism conjures up when the
Catholic religion is named." Coventry Pat-
more, a mystic in the very essence of his nature,
was more and more irresistibly, although un-
consciously, being drawn in the direction of
the transcendent and the supernatural. There
was no discussion of religious difficulties between
the husband and wife, simply because, in the
advance of her malady, Emily could not
endure it. Coventry did not admit, and was
not indeed aware of any leaning to Rome, but
the acute sensibility of his wife detected the
trend of feeling. On her death-bed, and indeed
only a few days before the close, she startled
him by saying, with tears, " When I am gone,
they (the Catholics) will get you ; and then
I shall see you no more."

Her death, occurring at such a psychological
moment, disturbed almost as much as it

Hampstead and Heron s Ghyll 109

grieved him. He was not merely bowed down
with sorrow, but assailed by poignant doubts.
The blow was overwhelming in a double direc-
tion, and in its homely aspect it left him, with
his large young family and his straitened cir-
cumstances, almost helpless to perform the
duties which had fallen from her hands. Not-
withstanding this, his spiritual life seems to
have become calmer and more concentrated
than it had ever been. He was driven in upon
himself. The loss of his faultless companion
was coincident with a strange unkindness and
indifference on Tennyson's part, which de-
prived him of the friend whom he had loved
and admired the most. It is probable that his
affection had never been returned with any-
thing like an equal ardour, but this did not
prevent the fact of Tennyson's neglectful silence
from wounding Patmore to the quick. In his
bitterness, he felt that love and friendship were
alike lost to him, and he developed a sort of
austere inaccessibility which was quite new to
him. Remembering his experience with Tenny-
son, he was unwilling to trust his confidence
to others, and he drew aside into loneliness

1 1 o Coventry Patmore

with his children's animal cares and wants
alone to distract him. He was rewarded by
an accession of mystical rapture, of which he
has given this account : —

" For many months after [my wife's] death,
I found myself apparently elevated into a
higher spiritual region, and the recipient of
moral powers which I had always sought, but
never before abidingly obtained. As far as I
could see, God had suddenly conferred upon
me that quiet personal apprehension and love
of Him and entire submission to His will,
which I had so long prayed for in vain ; and
the argument against my change of religion
which I had before drawn from my wife's
state, I now drew from my own : concluding
that this faith could not be wrong which bore
such good fruits. But I discovered, as the sense
of her spiritual presence with me gradually
faded, that I was mistaking the tree which was
producing these fruits. It was not that of
supernatural grace in me, but the natural
love of the beauty of supernatural grace as I
recalled it in her ; and, at the end of a year,
I found myself greatly advanced indeed towards

Hampstead a?id Heron s Ghyll 1 1 1

that inviolable fidelity to God which He
requires, but still unmistakably short of its
attainment."

During this time, while he shrank from the
company of his earlier associates, there were
some of them who would not let him go.
Prominent among these was Woolner, whose
poem of My Beautiful Lady was at this time
published, not without Patmore's careful final
revision, and Aubrey de Vere, of whose lyrics
Henry Taylor and Patmore in concert now
printed a selection. But the most remarkable
new acquaintance formed at this period was
that of Wiliam Barnes, the poet of the Dorset-
shire dialect. All his life, Patmore was singu-
larly attracted to the language, atmosphere and
modes of thought of that district of England
which Mr. Hardy has taught us to call Wessex.
Patmore thought it the most classical, the
richest and most abundant province of our
country. Barnes, although at this time a man of
over sixty years of age, had not yet inherited his
full renown. His third collection of Poems of
Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect had appeared
in 1862, and had come into Patmore's hands.

112 Coventry Patmore

He liked them, and he turned to the earlier
collections of 1844 and 1859, ^^^ enjoyed
these still more ; he wrote articles in several
prominent periodicals claiming for the work of
Barnes a prestige which it had never before
been granted.

When he began to correspond with the Dorset-
shire poet, he found many links of a private kind.
Barnes had been bereaved, as Patmore had been,
of a devotedly worshipped wife, who had left a
similar number of little children behind her. The
two poets wrote to one another consolingly " of
the result of a like loss from a matured experi-
ence." In the early months of 1863 Patmore de-
clared to Barnes that no other living man's his-
tory attracted him so much as the Dorset poet's
did ; " I stedfastly intend to see you this
year," he added. Neither Patmore nor Barnes
was rich enough to travel recklessly. But in
the summer of 1863 ^^ former, irresistibly
drawn, contrived to make his way to Dor-
chester. He had formed a very exalted notion
of his host ; he discovered a plain little old
man, adorably simple, dressed picturesquely in
the garments of a past age, gifted with an

f.

J

■■

-v '-M^F

Hampstead and Heron s Ghyll 113

instinctive power of idyllic song, but of
limited experience in life and thought. Pat-
more was full of poetry, and inspired by trans-
cendent speculations ; he found Barnes sur-
rounded by glossaries and grammars. As
Patmore whimsically described it, years after-
wards, to a friend who had been visiting at
Came Winterbourne the then very venerable
Mr. Barnes — he wanted to discuss the mystery
of the Incarnation and he found Barnes
buried " in a horrible kind of philological
thing he called TiwP Patmore retained
through life his high respect for the character
and genius of Barnes, but I do not think that
he made any further attempt to cultivate his
personal acquaintance.

This was an example of the idealizing habit
which grew upon Patmore at this time, and
which coloured the rest of his communications
with his fellow-beings. He was irresistibly
induced to set before them an exceedingly
high standard of conduct, of achievement, of
capacity. Nobody came up, in common life,
to Patmore's conception beforehand of what
they were capable of being and doing. It was

114 Cove7itry Patmore

not censoriousness which made him exacting,
it was rather the heated atmosphere in which he
saw life. What seemed a harshness often sprang
out of a fondness, for it was his very belief
in the high capacity of those whom he admired
which led so inevitably to disappointment.
He thought in hyperbole, and nothing was
moderate or mediocre with him. If he approved
of a person, that person walked along the
mountain-tops, with the light of God upon his
face. He disapproved, and the man became
not merely a failure, a poor creature, but a
positive cretin^ a blot upon the face of nature.
This violence of judgment, and this dispropor-
tionate idealism, had always, no doubt, been
present in his nature, but they were kept in
hand by his first wife's sober and firm influence.
After her death, in the earliest painful months
of isolation, they asserted themselves and
became patently characteristic.

Patmore's relations to his own children par-
took of this extravagance of feeling. From
1862 to 1864 they formed his principal solici-
tude, and no man, left lonely in this piteous
condition, was ever more anxious to do his

Hampstead aiid Hero7ts Ghyll 115

duty to those for whose lives he was responsible.
Many of his letters from this period have been
printed by his careful and tactful biographer ;
it is impossible to deny that they give a some-
what painful impression. One little girl has
expressed the hope that her sister will not be
disappointed by something ; her father writes :
" You may be quite sure that I am as tender
about Bertha's feelings as you are." The
four younger children were placed, early in
1863, in the care of some ladies at Finchley,
and Patmore saw them almost every day.
He loved them, and they seem to have been
both intelligent and well-behaved. But he
suffered cruelly from the utterly impossible
standard of conduct which he placed before
them. He made no allowance for the insta-
bility of childhood or even for the frailty of
mankind. His spirit was ceaselessly sore within
him because some little naughty person had
been disobedient, or boisterous, or forgetful.
" The immense superiority of girls over boys "
struck him more and more forcibly, but even
girls were sadly to seek. Quite little girls,
alas ! find it difficult to say their prayers and

1 1 6 Coveittry Patmore

read quite " as willingly and long and deliber-
ately " as Patmore expected his daughters
to do.

The constant strain of responsibility for
these young motherless creatures was very
trying to his nerves. He gave the subject a
consideration too constant, and he lost, in his
lonely excitement, a sense of proportion. All
the little wayward errors which a mother deals
with so patiently, corrects so gently and says
nothing about, took monstrous proportions to
this austere idealist, with his impossible expecta-
tions. He was driven to an exaggeration which
must make us smile. He wrote : "I have
indeed very little respect for children. Their
so-called innocence is want of practice rather
than inclination, and all bad passions seem to
me to be more violent in children than in
men and women, and more wicked because in
more immediate conjunction with the divine
vision." This view has at least the interest
of being diametrically opposed to the lazy
optimism which treats children as waxen toys
whose very faults are funny. Sin did not amuse
Patmore, and what is worthy of a smile is

Hampstead and Heron s Ghyll wj

not the suggestiveness of the moral paradox,
but its pathetic exaggeration. Before a widower
with a flock of youthful souls to take care of
can write thus, he must have undergone a
good deal of internal exasperation for which
his boisterous babes are only in part to blame.
It was at this time, and after one of these
painful moods, that he wrote the ode called
" The Toys," which illustrates, with more
delicacy and truth of analysis than any bio-
grapher can hope to seize, the ceaseless oscilla-
tion of his spirit between severity and tender-
ness. It is a " document " of the highest
possibly value to us in forming a just notion of
the temperament of Patmore : —

My little Son, who looked from thoughtful eyes

And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,

Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,

I struck him, and dismiss'd

With hard words and unkiss'd,

His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,

I visited his bed,

But found him slumbering deep,

With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet

From his late sobbing wet.

And I, with moan.

1 1 8 Coventry Patmore

Kissing away his tears, left others of my own ;

For, on a table drawn beside his head,

He had put, within his reach,

A box of counters, and a red-vein'd stone,

A piece of glass abraded by the beach.

And six or seven shells,

A bottle with bluebells,

And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful

art.
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept, and said :

Ah ! when at last we lie with tranced breath.
Not vexing Thee in death.
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys.
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less

Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
" I vwll be sorry for their childishness."

But everything was drawing him in one
inevitable direction, although as yet he knew
it not. Nothing served to assuage his melan-
choly, which time seemed to deepen rather
than to remove. The great religious question
oppressed his thoughts more and more. He
was already a man of settled practical piety,

Hampstead and Heron s Ghyll 119

and nothing in his conduct or his habits of
thought interfered with the perfect candour of
his soul in relation to heavenly things. In
later years he never accused himself of anything
more serious than ignorance of the will of God
in this slow and painful transformation of his
faith. Something began to draw him irresistibly
to the city of Rome, and in February 1864
he obtained the needful leave of absence for
the purpose of making a lengthy stay there.
He started with no anticipations of pleasure
on the way — " I expect to be very dull and
miserable," — but as though drawn by some
superhuman force along an inevitable path.
Aubrey de Vere, however, was in Rome, " and
nobody can be dull or miserable where Mr. de
Vere is." Patmore's first impression of Rome
was deeply unfavourable ; the idealist had
been at work, as usual, and had formed a
dream-picture of a celestial city, all majesty
and refinement, which the squalid quarters of
modern Rome most cruelly belied.

Patmore was admitted, however, into " the
best Catholic society of the great centre of
Catholic life," and at last, as if quite suddenly,

I20 Coventry Patmore

he perceived why he had come to Rome. It
was that he might get the great question of
religion settled once and for all. He accepted
the situation, and placed himself under the
regular instruction of a Jesuit, Father Car-
della. He tells us that all his intellectual
objections were confuted, and his will was
more and more powerfully attracted, but that,
together with the attraction, grew the alter-
nating reluctance and repulsion. This went
on for many weeks, in the friendly company
of the gentle and distinguished persons,
Italian and English, to whom Aubrey de Vera
had presented him. "Their ways," he says,
" convinced me that I should not be leaping
into any strange gulf of uncongenial life if
I became a Catholic, but no one helped me
nearly so much to remove this fear as a lady
whom I now met in this society."

This lady, destined to be Coventry Patmore's
second Egeria, was Marianne Caroline Byles,
who had at one time been looked upon as
likely to be the second wife of Manning, and
who had in comparatively mature years ex-
changed the Anglican for the Roman com-

Hampstead and Heron s Ghyll 121

munion. She was older than the poet, being
at this time nearly forty- two years of age.
The influence which she exercised over Patmore
is best described in his own words : —

" I had never before beheld so beautiful a
personality, and this beauty seemed to be the
pure effulgence of Catholic sanctity. After
a short acquaintance, which progressed rapidly
to intimate friendship, I asked her to be my
wife. Her reply was that she was under a
formal religious promise never to marry, having
placed, by the hands of a priest, her written
undertaking to that effect upon the altar and
under the chalice containing the Blessed
Sacrament. I thought this answer final, not
having any idea how easily such undertakings
are dispensed with in the Catholic Church,
provided they are not monastic. I continued,
but in much depression of spirits, my hitherto
line of meditation, with the same alternation
of periods of repulsion and attraction, and the
same apparent hopelessness of reconciling
reason and conscience, till one night, as I was
sitting alone at my hotel, it struck me that
nothing would ever bring about this recon-

122 Coventry Patmore

ciliation except the act of submission, and
that this act certainly would do so. For the
first time, I felt that I was able and that I
ought to take this leap . . . and fearing that
the clearness in which my path now lay might
be obscured, I set off to the house of the
Jesuits and insisted on being admitted, though
it was long after the hour at which the
rule had closed its doors. Father Cardella re-
fused to receive me as a Catholic there and then,
but I made my general confession to him, and
was received a day or two afterwards."

Patmore lived thirty-two years after this
event, but no shadow of religious doubt ever
crossed his understanding or his conscience
again, and we have to regard him from this
time forward as having come completely into
harmony with the dogmas and the traditions
of the Catholic Church. In this he displays
an interesting likeness to a poet of the seven-
teenth century whose genius had some rela-
tion with his own, Richard Crashaw. An
immediate result of the decisive step Patmore
had taken was to remove the veil of nervous
depression which had hung over him. He

Hampstead and Heron s Ghyd 123

became radiant with spiritual complacency
and joy, and everything around him was
bathed in rose-colour. It is evident that his
relation to Miss Byles immediately took a
fresh aspect. She was the first person, outside
the circle of the Jesuits, to whom he communi-
cated the fact that he had found peace. Her
scruples against marriage were no longer
serious, or — as seems possible — she had dwelt
upon them with feminine cunning in order to
force him into the way of her faith. At all
events we find the couple promptly betrothed
(May 1864). But an honourable difficulty
now arose. Patmore had believed Miss Byles
to be the paid companion of an elder lady with
whom she was travelling, and who was evidently
wealthy. To his extreme confusion he dis-
covered that the money belonged to Miss
Byles herself, who possessed a considerable
fortune. Exceedingly annoyed and abashed at
this circumstance, he suddenly left Rome and
abandoned his suit ; but he was persuaded to
" condone the embarrassing condition " and
to return. They went back separately to
England, and in July were married at Bays-
water.

124 Coventry Patmore

Of Marianne Patmore, as she now became,
singularly little has been preserved or recorded.
She was a woman of taste and even of a little
learning, pious, gentle and somewhat timid.
Her husband's loud protestations and emphasis
of statement kept her in a perpetual tremor,
but she was entirely devoted to love and
admiration of him. The faithful biographer of
Coventry Patmore, Mr. Basil Champneys, has
been obliged, after baffling search, to record of
Marianne, the poet's second wife, that " the
extraordinary self-effacement and reticence
which was characteristic of her in life seems
fated to attend her memory." She was her
husband's devoted companion for nearly six-
teen, as her predecessor had been for nearly
fifteen years.

It is certain that during the debateable
period between his first wife's death and his
second marriage, Patmore's ideas with regard
to poetry underwent a very remarkable change.
In later life he was accustomed to insist on the
essential oneness of his work, and to point to
its uniform features. But setting his eloquent
casuistry aside, the reader cannot fail to see a

Hampstead a?id Heron s Ghyll 125

very broad chasm lying between what he wrote
up to 1862 and what he wrote after that date.
In the first place the appeal to a popular judg-
ment, to a wide circle of amiable readers,
entirely disappears. Patmore, with the re-
moval of so many earthly ties, and with the
growth of what was mystical and transcendental
in his temperament, became haughty in his
attitude to the world. His conscientiousness
as an artist was quickened, and at the same
time he gave way to a species of intellectual
arrogance which had always been dormant in
his nature, but which now took the upper hand.
He was no longer anxious to please by any
concessions to the public taste, and the earliest
sign of his altered temper was that discontinu-
ance, of which mention has already been made,
of The Angel in the House. In his new mood,
he had nothing more to tell the curates and the
ladies about Frederick and Felix.

His mind turned to another ambition. He
formed the design of a long poem, the precise
scope of which he never divulged, but which
was to deal with the moral questions evoked
by what the poet considered the grave decad-

12 6 Cove 72 try Patmore

ence of the age. He was to sing, with fervour
and despair, a loud song which few would care
to hear, but which had to be sung " because
the dark comes on apace, when none can work
for fear." From the first he had no illusions
about the popularity of what he would now
write : —

One said, Take up thy Song,

That breathes the mild and almost mythic time

Of England's prime !

But I, Ah, me,

The freedom of the few

That, in our free land, were indeed the free,

Can song renew ?

Ill singing 'tis with blotting prison-bars,

How high soe'er, betwixt us and the stars ;

111 singing 'tis when there are none to hear.

It is of fragments of the poem inspired by

this theme and in this mood that the Odes of

1868 were composed. We may see in these

nine remarkable lyrics a certain note of unity

in method, but of unity of subject there is very

little. Patmore intended no doubt to make

the poem a general confession, a record of his

soul's adventures in face of life and the world.

But it is doubtful whether even Milton or

Leopardi, the two poets with whom at this

Hajnpstead and Her oil s Ghyll 127

juncture it is natural to compare him, could
have succeeded in producing an integral work
on these particular lines ; and the partiality of a
biographer must not blind us to the fact that
we are dealing with a writer of less constructive
force than Leopardi, not to speak of Milton.

As the vehicle of his Od,es^ and indeed of
most of the subsequent poetry of his life, Pat-
more chose a curious form, which was justified,
I think, more by the admirable success of many
of his experiments in it than by its inherent
beauty. This was a broken and irregular
arrangement in what he described as " catalec-
tic " metre, but which reminded the profane
of what Patmore particularly despised and re-
jected, the loose measures called Pindaric after
Cowley's misconception of the metrical system
of Pindar. Patmore scorned the amorphous
odes of the Restoration period, and claimed
that his own had no relation with them. Yet
when Patmore is languid and Cowley is
unusually felicitous, it is difficult to see much
difference in the form of their odes. Whether
Patmore ever acknowledged it or no, or indeed
whether the fact has ever been observed, I

12 8 Cove7itry Patmore

know not, but the true analogy of his Oies is
with the Italian lyric of the early Renaissance.
It is in the writings of Petrarch and Dante,
and especially in the Canzoniere of the former,
that we must look for examples of the source
of Patmore's later poetic form.

At the close of 1865, as it was no longer
necessary for him to work for his living, and as
a tendency to lung complaint warned him of
the danger of remaining in London, Patmore
resigned his position as an assistant in the
Library of the British Museum, and withdrew
to the country. He bought two contiguous
estates, covering about four hundred acres, on
the borders of Ashdown Forest in Sussex.
There was an ancient, but uncomfortable and
neglected house, and this, with the whole of
both estates, had to be taken in hand and im-
proved. Nothing in the past experience of
Patmore had prepared him for such labours ;
but his remarkable business ability only re-
quired an opportunity to develop itself. " The
problem before him was to make his house
healthy, habitable and architecturally pleasing ;
to convert the land adjoining it from its aspect

Coventry Patmore.

From a Photograph by G. Bradshaw, 1 8

Hampstead and Heron s Ghyll 129

of a somewhat neglected farm into the suitable
setting of a gentleman's residence ; to master
all the details of agricultural management,
game-preserving, and the duties of a landlord ;
and to do all this with extreme economy, so
that each step taken might enhance the value
of the estate by more than the expenditure."
How he solved the problem is told in the little
volume entitled How I Managed and Improved
my Estate (1888), a book which goes far to out-
balance the charges so often brought against
poets as persons of no business capacity. After
1868 it was the garden, the fish-ponds and the
woods which engaged his attention.

The exquisite serenity of this active and yet
healthy and cheerful life is reflected on much
of the verse that he wrote at this time. His
invitation to Felicity was perfectly responded
to :—

So with me walk,
And view the dreaming field and bossy autumn wood,
And how in humble russet goes
The Spouse of Honour, fair Repose,
Far from a world whence love is fled
And truth is dpng because joy is dead . . .
Let us to stiller place retire,

130 Coventry Pat more

And glad admire

How, near Him, sounds of working cease

In little fervour and much peace ;

And let us talk

Of holy things in happy mood,

Learnt of thy blest twin-sister, Certitude.

He became calm, and he became gleeful.
The old depression of spirits, the old irregu-
larity of mood, passed away, and he was both
mentally and physically invigorated. The
name of the estate where the house stood was
Buxted Old Lands, a title which the poet con-
sidered neither pretty nor significant ; in 1 868
he altered it to Heron's Ghyll, in reference
to the beautiful, but marauding birds which
gathered to his fish-ponds as to a banquet.

In April, 1868, Patmore printed for private
circulation nine of the fragments which he had
probably ^ been writing at intervals since his
first wife's death. They took the form of an
anonymous paper pamphlet, with pale green

^ Mr. Basil Champneys' conjecture that aU these nine
odes were suddenly composed in the first three months of
1868, does not seem to me in accordance with probabiUty
or with internal evidence ; but no record of their exact
dates has been preserved.

IIa7npstead and Heron s Ghyll 131

covers, bearing only the words Oies [not pub-
lished] ; a short preface was signed " C. P.,
Old Lands, Uckfield, April 17, 1868." In
1 88 1, before any bibliographical curiosity in
Patmore's writings had been excited, I asked
him how he could account for the extreme
rarity of these Odes. He told me that only
250 copies were printed, and that he sent
copies in all directions, to his friends, and to
strangers who might, he fancied, be interested
in them. But he found that they were uni-
versally received with indifference or mystifi-
cation, and so one day, in the autumn of 1868,
as he was seated in front of the great open fire-
place in the hall of Heron's Ghyll, he deter-
mined to make away with what were left of
them. His daughters, it appears, had fortun-
ately withdrawn a few, but 103 copies remained,
and these the poet destroyed then and there.
The anonymous Odes of 1868 is therefore one of
the rarest as it is one of the most interesting
poetical volumes of the Victorian age.

It is difficult to account for the frigid recep-
tion, by Patmore's particular admirers, of
poems so original and in part so beautiful as

132 Coventry Patmore

these nine odes. Ruskin, it is true, though
without enthusiasm, " recognized the noble-
ness " in them, and there is some reason to
believe that Carlyle, with whom Patmore was
just now again in intimate relations, approved.
But Aubrey de Vere, whose graceful traditions
they mortified, strongly disapproved of them,
and others, like Tennyson, perceived nothing.
It was at this moment that all England had
its ears open to the brilliant melodies of Mr.
Swinburne ; no other music could be heard.
Yet it seems amazing that among all the ini-
tiates and experts to whom the little pamphlet
was sent there should not have been one who
perceived, as a portent, the beauty of : —

Love, light for me

Thy ruddiest blazing torch,

That I, albeit a beggar by the Porch

Of the glad Palace of Virginity,

May gaze within, and sing the pomp I see ;

For, crown'd with roses all,

'Tis thou, O Love, they keep thy festival !

or were amused by the audacity which de-
scribed the year 1867, with its Reform Bill
and its Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer,
as : —

Hampstead and He?^ons Ghyll 133

Year of the great Crime,
When the false English nobles and their Jew,
By God demented, slew
The trust they stood thrice pledged to keep from wrong.

The fortunate thing is, however, that Pat-
more, however angry and disillusioned he
might be, was thoroughly determined to pro-
ceed, and that the discouraging result of his
experiment in 1868 did not in any degree pre-
vent him from pushing on to further heights
of boldness and vigour. The ultimate Un-
known Eros could scarcely have been more
admirable than it is if its beginnings had been
greeted, as those of The Angel in the House had
been, by the plaudits of Browning, Tennyson
and Rossetti.

Chapter V

LAST YEARS (i 870-1 896)

PATMORE improved and enlarged
Heron's Ghyll, until it became a
sort of white elephant, and was
too expensive for him to keep up. Moreover,
agricultural depression began to make itself
sensibly felt, and he feared to find himself
stranded with a very costly toy which he could
neither use nor part with. He was fortunate
in letting and then selling the property in
1874 to the Duke of Norfolk, who gave him
^27,000 for it, ^^8,500 more than the original
cost and the improvements together had
come to. This deserves peculiar celebration
as an instance, possibly unique, of a poet's
having made a substantially advantageous
bargain in a business transaction. Between
the letting and the final transference of
Heron's Ghyll to the Duke, the Patmores took
a furnished house in London, and at this
time he made several of the acquaintances of

Last Tears (i 870-1 896) 135

his later life, besides reviving some old friend-
ships. But London never suited his health,
and he looked out at once for another and
less responsible country residence.

When Patmore had been only five or six
years of age he had been taken to Hastings in
a coach, and had noticed, as they drove along
the old London road, a large house facing the
High Street, the whole front of which was
covered by an enormous magnolia. The
child registered a vow that when he grew
up and was a man he would come and live
in that beautiful house, with its casing of
great white blossoms. It was somewhat ex-
traordinary that in 1875, when he was looking
about for a home, this identical dwelling,
called the Milward Mansion, was offered to him.
He accepted it with alacrity, and on terms
which, as he believed, secured him the use
of it for life. This residence had immense
advantages for him. It was easy of access
from London, whereas a visit to Heron's
Ghyll had been like an adventure into virgin
forest. It was exceedingly amusing, in its
proximity to the picturesque life of the old

136 Coventry Patmore

borough, if Patmore wished to be amused ;
while it was so far protected and sequestered,
that by stepping into the high terraced garden
he could at any moment retire into absolute
seclusion. For seventeen years the Milward
Mansion (or Manor House) was Patmore's
home, and he lived here in great serenity and
independence, enlivened by frequent visits from
his friends, and leading exactly the life which
it pleased him to lead. The Hastings period
was not without its sorrows ; its bereavements
indeed were frequent and severe ; but on the
whole it was probably the happiest segment
of the poet's life.

Among those with whom he had renewed
personal intercourse in 1874 ^^^ Mrs. Procter.
The aged poet, her husband, who had been
known as Barry Cornwall, was at that time
under a cloud of senile decay. Patmore's
sympathies were warmly drawn out by the
spectacle of his old friends' troubles, and he
showed most delicate attention to Mrs. Procter.
When her husband died at length, in the
autumn of 1874, Patmore's kindly help was
redoubled. In her cordial gratitude, Mrs.

Last Years (187 0-189 6) 137

Procter thought to do Patmore honour by-
giving him the task of writing the life and
editing the remains of Barry Cornwall. As
he told me, soon after, he was " aghast " at
the proposition, and did all he could to dis-
suade the lady, but she was firm in insisting.
" I could not refuse," Patmore said, " though
it was a task little suited to me. I was never
really intimate with Procter, though I had
known him many years ; and though I ad-
mired his simple, sincere and reticent charac-
ter, I cared little for his poetry." A biography-
started under these conditions was not likely
to be satisfactory. After long delays there
appeared at last, in 1877, Bryan Waller
Procter^ consisting of a memoir, an autobio-
graphical fragment and some letters, the
whole put together in the most languid and
perfunctory manner possible. The dangers of
obliging Coventry Patmore to do something
which he did not want to do were startlingly
exemplified in this unfortunate volume, which
is destitute of all biographical merit. Mrs.
Procter, however, a woman of singular tact,
professed herself well pleased with it. This

138 Coventry Pat ?n ore

biography, to which merely the initials C.P.
were grudgingly affixed, was Patmore's earliest
prose-work published in the form of a book.

He was now, however, preparing for the
publication of a poetical work of the very
highest importance. In 1873, as we have seen,
a scruple of conscience had combined with an
alteration of taste to make him for the moment
profoundly dissatisfied with The Angel in the
House. He withdrew this popular work from
circulation, and made a bonfire of the re-
mainder of the current edition. This strange
prejudice, which soon passed away, was coin-
cident with a violent impulse to produce
poetry of that more mystical and transcen-
dental order, of which the Odes of 1868 had
given a small circle of readers the foretaste.
To a friend, who gently reproached him with
idleness, he replied : — " No amount of idle-
ness is wrong in a poet. Idleness is the
growing time of his harvest," and he indicated
that the field of his imagination was growing
ripe for the sickle : —

" I have no plans as yet, for none of my
old ones seem wide enough ; but I am pre-

Last Years (1870-189 6) 139

paring myself, by six or seven hours reading
and thought every day, for any plans that may
be presented to me. If I am to do any more
work, it must be on some new level. The
longer it is before the key-note of my new
song is given to me, the sweeter perhaps it
will be."

In the transition, it seems that Ruskin was
of great service. It will be recalled that in
1868 he had not perfectly responded to the
appeal of the Odes^ but he now wrote that
" no living human being had ever done any-
thing that helped him so much " as Patmore
had by writing these poems. Yet the poet
continued to wait, as he always did, for " a
flash of spiritual health " to reawaken his
genius. He read mystical Catholic poetry,
and in particular the De Partu Virginis of
Sanazzaro, but that did not inspire him. The
settling in of his household, under the great
magnolia at Hastings, seems at last to have
started the beat of the pulse of poetry, although
the vigorous ode called " The Standards " is
earlier still and belongs to 1874. Another
political satire, " Peace," perhaps opens the

140 Coventry Pat more

series of odes written at Hastings, but to
1876 certainly belong " A Farewell," " Let
Be," " The Two Deserts," and " If I were
Dead," amongst others. An undated note,
which may perhaps be attributed to 1877,
says, " I have written as much in the last
three weeks as the whole of the nine Odes^"*
His best things were always composed most
quickly. The " Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore,"
one of the longest and most elaborate of
the new odes, took two hours to write, and
several of the best numbers in The Unknown
Eros even less, although Patmore would often
occupy days and weeks in polishing up one
short passage to the level of the best.

The outburst of this passion of poetry,
and the rapid ripening of this second and
richer harvest of Patmore's genius was coin-
cident with an emotional crisis in his religious
life. He was now in his fifty-fifth year,
and had reached an age at which it is usual
for the more vivid impulses of brain and body
to decline. At fifty-four a man has usually
tasted all the dishes which make up the
banquet of life, and has no great desire to

Last Tears [I'^'jo- 1?> (^6) 141

begin the feast over again. He has formed
his opinions and appeased his curiosity, and
he is fortunate if he has not allowed his ex-
perience to fortify him in that " sotte et
caduque fierte," which Montaigne describes
as the intellectual vice of approaching old
age, that obstinate satisfaction in what is
already known and seen which dulls the heart
and fossilizes the brain. On the contrary,
at this advanced stage of middle life, a great
wave of passion broke over Patmore's spirit,
and bore him along with it. His imagina-
tion, his mystical and his religious vitalities
were simultaneously quickened, and he walked
along the sea by Hastings, or over its gorse-
clad downs, muttering as a young man mutters,
with joy uplifting his pulses and song breaking
from his lips.

This condition had been preceded by a
depressed and melancholy one. He had
thought himself failing both in intellectual
and spiritual power. His digestion had long
been weak, and in consequence he had availed
himself of the dispensations from fasting
which the Catholic Church so readily grants

142 Coventry Patmore

for a reasonable cause. Patmore had set his
dullness down to overindulgence, and when
the fast of 1877 came round, he resolved to
keep it fully. He was unable, however, to
digest eggs or fish, and so had to keep the fast
on vegetables. This reduced him to the verge
of a serious illness, but an alteration of diet
staved off the malady. He was not aware
of a further change, but it probably came
about Easter, 1877. Doubtless the physical
conditions helped to bring it on, and it is
difficult to believe that the severe fasting,
although weakening for the moment, had not
been salutary. The religious development
which now followed he had described in
terms of great moderation and simplicity in
a fragment of autobiography. He had now
for thirteen years been a member of the Roman
Church, and during all that time no shadow
of a doubt had crossed his understanding.
But there were certain points on which his
feelings had always been hopelessly out of
harmony with the feelings and practice of
most Catholics. This was particularly the
case with regard to the Blessed Virgin. His

Last Years (i 870-1 896) 143

experience is so interesting, that it is best
here to give his own words : —

" I was in the habit, indeed, of addressing
Her in prayer, and believed that I had often
found such prayers to be successful beyond
others ; but I could not abide the Rosary,
and was chilled and revolted at what seemed
to me the excess of many forms of devotion
to Her. Good I hoped might come of some
practical contradiction of this repugnance,
some confession in act and will of what my
feelings thus refused to accept. I therefore
resolved to do the very last thing in the world
which my natural inclination would have
suggested. I resolved to make an external
profession of my acceptance of the Church's
mind by a pilgrimage to Lourdes. This I
undertook without any sensible devotion, and
merely in the temper of a business man who
does not leave any stone unturned when a
great issue is at stake, though the prospect
of attaining thereby what he seeks may seem
exceedingly small. Accordingly, on the 14th
of October 1877, I knelt at the shrine by the
River Gave, and rose without any emotion or

1 44 Coventry Patmore

enthusiasm or unusual sense of devotion, but
with a tranquil sense that the prayers of
thirty-five years had been granted."

The importance of this passage, to the
student of Coventry Patmore's character, is
not to be exaggerated. It offers us the key
of his life, his attitude, his entire contribution
to literature ; it offers us the key, but it leaves
to us the task of turning it in the lock. He
does not mention here, what was a deliberate
part of his plan, that he hoped to get fresh
inspiration for his Odes from the atmosphere
of Lourdes. In this he was not disappointed.
He had not anticipated any natural charm
in the Pyrenean place of pilgrimage, but he
found that " for beauty and sublimity it
defies all description." Not ready to ex-
patiate in full-mouthed catalogues of the
charms of scenery, he has nowhere in all his
correspondence indulged in so many enumera-
tions of them as in connection with his visits
to Lourdes : —

" The effect of this climate on the health
and spirits is quite intoxicating," he says
for instance in October 1877. "The air is

Last Tears (187 0-189 6) ^45

cool and sharp, but the sun is like a hot fire
close by. One may put up one's hands to
warm them by it. The world looks like a
jewel for brightness. Snow-fields, thirty
miles off, look half a mile away. Little lizards
run about the rocks in the hot light, and
beautiful half-butterflies, half-grasshoppers,
leap and fly whenever one moves."

He came home full of enthusiasm and
happiness, in perfect health, and longing
to relieve in the composition of poetry that
vibration of ecstasy which made dreams of his
days and kept him awake for joy at night.
The series of odes, thirty-one in number,
which formed the collection entitled The
Unknown Eros, were rapidly revised and com-
pleted, and this important volume made its
appearance in 1877. But it did not contain
the great ode called " The Child's Purchase,"
which seems to have taken shape on the poet's
return journey from Lourdes. It had flashed
upon him during his pilgrimage that the one
absolutely lovely and perfect subject for
poetry, as he conceived it, would be the Mar-
riage of the Blessed Virgin. He had for some

10

146 Coventry Patmore

time been laying, as he hoped, a durable
foundation for the exercise of his mystical
fancy by reading daily in St. Thomas Aquinas.
The copy in which he studied the Summa was
one of consummate beauty ; it was of the
first edition of the O-pera Omnia (1570-71),
in seventeen volumes, printed on vellum and
bound in purple morocco.^ Patmore con-
sidered St. Thomas " a huge reservoir of the
sincere milk of the Word," and the result of
studying him seriously was that in his own
brain the poetry began to grow " like the
moonrise when the disk is still below the
horizon."

The ode which has just been mentioned,
" The Child's Purchase," should be exam-
ined if we wish to obtain an insight into Pat-
more's intentions at this critical moment. It
contains a direct dedication of his powers to
that service and celebration of the Blessed
Virgin which, up to this time, he had

1 For an interesting account of this bibliographical
treasure, which Patmore ultimately gave to the British
Museum, see Mr. Basil Champneys' Life and Letters,
vol. ii., appendix 6, pp. 443-445.

Last Years (i 870-1 896) 147

neglected. He describes himself as a child,
whose mother in jest flings him down a golden
coin. This is, of course, his poetical genius.
He is to spend, that is to saj^ to exercise, it
as he best pleases, and he will buy " a horse, a
bride-cake, or a crown." But he wearies in
the quest, and determines at last to bring his
gold coin back to his Mother and to give it
back to her in exchange for a kiss. Accord-
ingly, " verging upon, but never entering, the
breathless region of Divinity," Patmore will
dedicate his golden gift of poetic speech, no
longer to any earthly use, however innocent
or salutary, but to the direct glory of the
divine Mother : —

Ah ! Lady elect,

Whom the Time's scorn has saved from its respect,

Would I had art

For uttering this which sings within my heart !

But, lo !

Thee to admire is all the art I know.

My mother and God's ; Fountain of miracle !

Give me thereby some praise of thee to tell . . .

Grant me the steady heat

Of thought wise, splendid, sweet,

Urged by the great rejoicing wind that rings.

With draught of unseen wings,

Making each phrase, for love and for delight,

Twinkle like Sirius on a frosty night.

148 Coventry Pat mo re

The same poem, imperfect perhaps from
its very excess of emotion, but possessing
admirable portions, closes with lines which
have a great value in the biography of our
poet. Looking back at his past verse, he
cries : —

Mother, who lead'st me still by unknown ways,

Giving the gifts I know not how to ask,

Bless thou the work

Which, done, redeems my many wasted days.

Makes white the mark,

And crowns the few that thou wilt not dispraise.

When clear my songs of ladies' graces rang,

And little guessed I 'twas of thee I sang !

Vainly, till now, my prayers would thee compel

To fire my verse with thy shy fame, too long

Shunning world-blazon of well-ponder'd song ;

But doubtful smiles, at last, 'mid thy denials lurk ;

From which I spell,

" Humility and greatness grace the task

Which he who does it deems impossible ! "

This prodigious effort — and no lyrical poet
has moved in a more ambitious cause — was
doomed to disappointment. Of the ma-
jestic song in praise of the Blessed Virgin
nothing remains but the initial ode and a few
fragments, — merely a porch, where a cathedral

Last Years (1870-189 6) 149

was intended to rise. Perhaps the strain was
excessive ; perhaps Patmore did not wait with
sufficient serenity of spirit for the heavenly
spark to fall. All we know is that the great
poem for which he made his pilgrimage to
Lourdes remains in the limbo of unconstructed
masterpieces.

Meanwhile, he was more fortunate with
humbler and less transcendental themes. In
1878 he published Amelia^ which is at once the
most human and the most inspired of all his
writings, that in which his poetic philosophy is
most plainly revealed. Some seventeen odes,
also subsequent to the Unknown Eros of 1877,
completed this section of his work. Of these
several give expression to a political hopeless-
ness which was obviously excessive at the time,
and which the passage of years has shown to be
wide of the mark. Without deciding whether
the trend of politics, with its long upward and
downward curves, has in the course of a
quarter of a century been for practical good or
evil, without expressing either joy or sorrow
at the chronicle of our institutions, it has at
least to be confessed that Patmore had no

150 Coventry Patmore

intuition of that trend. He was the wildest of
political prophets. In an ode like " Arbor
Vitae," the splendour of the imagery, the rush
of inflamed and angry thought, must be
accepted for their own sake ; beneath the
symbolism there lies no justice of public appre-
hension. The attacks of Patmore on the
Government of his day are not contributions
to philosophical poetry, consistent and intelli-
gible even in their savagery, like the admirable
lamhes of Auguste Barbier. They resemble
much more those political odes of Leopardi,
such as the " Italia " and the " Angelo Mai,"
in which the cup of scorn and anger overflows
without an aim, merely covering the whole
scheme of things with a spatter of contumely.
Far more delightful are the non-political
odes of Patmore which represent this his latest
period as a poet. A section of them — " Saint
Valentine's Day," " Sponsa Dei," " Psyche's
Discontent," "To the Body "—deals with
profound and subtle questions of sex, mystically
encountered. Other odes are purely human,
enchanting memories of past suffering nobly
borne, jewels fashioned in the furnace of

Last Years (187 0-189 6) ^5^

bereavement, " The Azalea," " Departure,"
" Auras of Delight." For the future all are
inextricably mingled in the division of his
poetry which Patmore chose to call The
Unknown Eros, and there they will doubtless
remain, like Rosicrucian symbols, wholly
unintelligible to the multitude, but discovered
with a panic of delight by a few elect souls in
every generation.

The publication of The Unknown Eros and
of Amelia, together with the resuscitation of
The Angel in the House, should have made the
year 1877-8 a period of partial revival in Pat-
more's career. But his reputation had sunk
into almost complete desuetude, and it could
not at once be revived. The tendency to revival,
however, now set in in private ; he made the
acquaintance of several younger writers, and
he found among them a sympathy which he
had ceased to enjoy in his relations with the
companions of his own youth. The memory
of those who first came into communication
with him at that time will dwell on the earliest
manifestations of a certain modification in his
character. They knew them as he was in the

152 Coventry Patmore

act of change ; they saw him already coloured
with transition. After 1880 he rather sud-
denly became an elderly man, having preserved
his youth for an unusually long time. He lived
sixteen years more, but these were years of
withdrawal and meditation. In this closing
period, Patmore preserved the unaltering
appearance of one who sits waiting for an
inevitable arrival. He chats, he writes a little,
he accedes to the claims of society, but he is
listening all the time for the sound of the
chariot-wheels.

It may be convenient here for me to take up
this little history from a more intimate stand-
point.

My personal acquaintance with Coventry
Patmore had opened by his courteously sending
me, in the summer of 1878, the four- volume
edition of his complete works, then just pub-
lished. In 1879 ■'■ "^^^ ^^"^ ^°^ ^^^ ^^st ^i"^^
at the Savile Club, of which he was for a short
while a member. It was in company with
several other and younger men, and he made
a highly disagreeable impression on me ; I
thought him harsh and sardonic ; he said little,

Last Tears (i 870-1 896) 153

and what he said was bitter. But, in the
course of 1880, after his removal to Hastings,
we began to correspond on the structure and
function of the Ode, a subject which he had
illustrated both in theory and practice, and on
which his views were curious and, I ventured
to think, on some points technically heterodox.
At length, soon after New Year's Day, 1881,
I was invited to Hastings to spend a Sunday
with him ; I went down, in some trepidation,
remembering that countenance as of a sourer
Macchiavelli which I had seen at the club, and
my reception was a surprise and an enchant-
ment. This was the first of unnumbered pil-
grimages, to which I shall always look back as
among the most tonic experiences of my social
life.

He had taken, as we have seen, the Milward
Mansion, a large, ancient house, then lately
vacated by the death of Countess Waldegrave,
in the centre of the old town of Hastings.
With its belt of venerable elms and its high
garden-terraces, the mansion looked, as Pat-
more used to say, " like a patch of forest in the
midst of the houses." It was approached

154 Coventry Patmore

from the High Street, but, the moment a
visitor entered its enclosures, he seemed lifted
at once out of the town, and suspended be-
tween cliff and sky and sea. When he entered,
the room immediately on his left was the poet's
study and the receptacle of his few books ;
beyond it, on the same side, a long, low draw-
ing-room opened directly upon the garden,
which surprised the eye here by its high level,
the house being perched in a dip of a sharp
incline. It is difficult to imagine a home
better suited to a poet's vagaries, so sequestered
was it within, so suddenly accessible from all
parts of the surrounding town. At this time,
and long afterwards, Patmore indulged a pas-
sion for nocturnal walks. Somnolent and
sluggish in the afternoon, his pulse would begin
to beat as the night came on, and would rise
into an excitement which nothing but a long,
wild stroll in the darkness could allay. On
occasion of my first visit to him, in January
1 88 1, I recollect that I was summoned to
accompany him. We sallied forth into the
gloom of the faintly-twinkling town, and
descended swiftly to the sea-wall. The night

Last Years (187 0-189 6) 155

was fine, with buffeting ^wind, the remnant of
a great storm ; the tide was high, and it was
difficult to pass along the Parade without being
drenched by the fountains of spray which
rose, mysterious and phantasmal, out of the
resounding darkness. My companion was in an
ecstasy ; he marched forward with his head in
the air, his loose, grey curls tossing in the breeze,
his coat blown wildly away from his thin
figure. He seemed, to my fancy, to be the
enchanter whose magic had raised all this tur-
moil of the elements, and to be empowered, at
will, to quiet it all in a moment. But this was
evidently no part of his pleasure. He revelled,
mischievously, in the riot, and he prophesied
the ruin of the sea-front of Hastings in words
the solemn effect of which was a little impaired
by the violent gusto with which they were
spoken. It was long before he could be per-
suaded that the tide was on the turn, and that
Hastings could not perish on that particular
night. And then his excitement fell ; moodily
and silently he climbed the deserted street.

Those who made Patmore's acquaintance
within the last few years of his life recall his

156 Coventry Patmore

company as enlivened by short spurts of speech
set in vast tracts of silence. But it was
not so in 1881. The speech, at least, was
more frequent, the silence less noticeably
long. My first Sunday at Hastings was
spent mainly at his study fire. I see him now,
stretched in his familiar seated attitude, his
hands clasped, his arms extended along his legs,
the whole body attenuated and immobile, only
the marvellous head moving sharply and fre-
quently, almost as if on a pivot, the eyes dark-
ling and twinkling, the Protean lips reflecting
in their curves every shade of feeling that
passed over the poet's mind. Out of this
attitude, he would move only to pounce, with
extraordinary suddenness, on one of the cigar-
ettes which lay strewn about, like leaves in
Vallombrosa, lighting it and then resuming his
shrouded and pinioned pose. And so sitting,
sloped to the fire, he would talk for hours of the
highest things, of thoughts and passions above
a mortal guise, descending every now and then
to earth in some fierce, eccentric jest, always
to be punctuated by a loud, crackling laugh,
ending in a dry cough.

Liust Years (187 0-189 6) ^57

In these first hours, he initiated me at once,
almost without prelude, into the ardent and
sublime mysticism which filled his imagina-
tion. That I quite comprehended would be to
say too much, but I sympathized and admired.
He could not discourse on these themes too
fully for my curiosity, and conditions happened
to have attuned my mind at that moment to
a particularly keen receptivity. It would be
affectation were I to pretend that the advent
of a pupil so enthusiastic did not give the soli-
tary prophet pleasure ; he expressed that
pleasure with his customary vehemence ; and
as I look back I recognize with grateful satis-
faction that I was able to comfort this austere
and beautiful spirit by my sympathy at the
moment of its deepest isolation. In 1881 the
very name of Patmore was still ridiculous.
The Unknown Eros was absolutely ignored ;
The Angel in the House, after its great, rustic
success, was wholly rejected by those who were
the tyrants of criticism. A very few persons of
authority, among whom the late Henry Sidg-
wick and Mr. Frederick Greenwood were pre-
eminent, still believed in Patmore as a poet, but

158 Cove?2try Patmore

their verdict was disregarded. He never ceased
to believe in himself ; indeed, at this very time,
when not a voice came to greet him from the
outer world, his virile pride was probably serener
than it had ever been. But self-supporting as
the soul may be, it pines for the human echo, and
what little intelligent sympathy I could give
was received as if it had been the gift of a king.
We ascended high indeed, the wren mount-
ing with giddy rapture on the wing of the
eagle. I have rarely touched such pure in-
tellectual enjoyment. To listen to Patmore
in those days, days of his spiritual ecstasy,
before the bitterness had fallen upon him,
was to assist at a solemn, mounting music.
From having lived so much alone, from
having escaped all the friction of the mind
which comes from indiscriminate intercourse,
his speech and thought had preserved, with a
certain savage oddity, a singular freshness, a
wild flavour of the berry. In talking to him,
one escaped from all the worn conventions
of conversation ; instead of rubbed and
greasy coppers, one received fresh-mined
gold. Patmore's intellect had now for a

L>ast Tears (i 870-1 896) 159

long while been fixed on a particular purpose,
which may perhaps be defined as the recon-
ciliation of modern life with the spirit of the
liturgical manuals of his communion and the
more mystical writings of the Fathers. He
was particularly devoted to a later ascetic
writer, St. John of the Cross, a Spaniard of
the sixteenth century, in whom Patmore
found an extraordinary agreement with the
views which he himself had formed in medita-
tion. He was fond of reading to me passages
of St. John of the Cross, which often sounded
exactly like rearrangements of The Unknown
Eros. I was surprised to find in 1881 that
Patmore was not acquainted with the poems
of our own most fiery mystic, Crashaw, and
I had the pleasure of sending them to
him. But he knew the originals at which
the torch of Crashaw had been lighted and
was tiresomely conscious of the conceits
and blemishes of an hysterical fancy. Yet
" Music's Duel," the great paraphrase from
Famianus Strada, he pronounced " perhaps
the most wonderful piece of word-craft ever
done."

i6o Coventry Patmore

It was now years since he had written a
page of prose, with the perfunctory exception
of the Bryan Waller Procter^ which he had
published in 1877 ; in earlier youth, the
practice of prose writing had afforded
him profit and satisfaction. It appeared
to me that it would now add alike to
his usefulness and to his enjoyment if he
resumed composition. Verse he had re-
luctantly abandoned for some time (I think
that his very latest printed poem dates from
1880), on the ground that he had sung what
he could not help singing, and that nothing
should be torn from a reluctant muse. But
I could see no reason why his exquisitely
lucid prose should not be given to the world.
To my first suggestions of this kind, he re-
plied that " the little working power I have
left in me is hes-poken^'' meaning that he had
not lost the hope that he might yet be in-
spired to continue the great poem on Divine
Love which he had dreamed of at Lourdes.
Under my continued pressure, however, in
February 1881, he showed me a MS. transla-
tion from St. Bernard on The Love of God,

Last Tears (187 0-189 6) ^^^

which his second wife, who died in 1880, had

begun and he had completed. This he said I

might find a publisher for, if I could, and I took

it up to London with me. Mr. Kegan Paul

consented to print it, and a few months later

it appeared. This is a very delightful treatise,

far too little known. It is always exciting

to a retired author to smell printer's ink

once more, and Patmore forthwith started

the composition of that " Sponsa Dei," of

which I shall presently have a doleful tale to

tell.

The latest of his poems, to which reference

has just been made, is the " Scire Teipsum,"

which opens thus : —

Musing I met, in no strange land,
What meet thou must to understand :
An angel. There was none but he,
Yet 'twas a glorious company :
God, Youth and Goddess, one, twain, trine.
In altering wedlock, flamed, benign,

which has always appeared to me an absolutely
typical specimen of the peculiar Patmorian
quintessence. In sending me the MS. of
these verses (July 25, 1882) he wrote : " They
may be taken ... as expressing the rewards

II

1 62 Coventry Patmore

of virginity — attainable even in this life — in
the supernatural order," and he went on to
lament that his years forbade him to be any
longer " a worker in the inexhaustible poetic
mine of psychology." In point of fact, he
was to publish verse no more.

His great interest in these years, in the
early eighties, was the beautiful church of
Our Lady Star of the Sea, which Mr. Basil
Champneys was building for him, almost
opposite the Mansion, but a little lower down
the street. This became Patmore's ceaseless
pre-occupation, and a daily delight it was, when
the workmen had left in the evening, to prowl
and potter round the foundations in the dusk
or watch the bright silver of the Channel
from their precincts. As the fabric rose,
Patmore's ecstasy increased ; when the scaf-
foldings could be safely mounted, he could
scarcely be induced to let them out of his
sight. This intense satisfaction in the noble
gift which he was presenting to his com-
munion lasted until the church was conse-
crated, but was soon after embittered and
destroyed by disputes which, at length, made

Last Tears [i^ JO- 1 ^()6) 163

him glad to leave Hastings. I think it right
to record my opinion that in this wretched
matter he was somewhat in fault, through in-
dulgence in that inflexible arrogance which
was a defect in his great character, but the
arguments on the other side, which Mr.
Champneys has brought forward, should be
carefully weighed. In connection with his
own church, Patmore developed a sudden
enthusiastic interest in ecclesiastical sculp-
ture ; this was awakened by seeing, in the
summer of 1882, Mr. Thornycroft's superb
statue of " Artemis " which belongs to the
Duke of Westminster. The virginal fresh-
ness of this figure appealed with extraordinary
fervour to Patmore's imagination, and he
desired that an attempt should be made to
induce one of our first sculptors to model a
Madonna, " of which," he said, " the marble
original should be taken by some wealthy
church like Arundel, and casts be supplied
to other churches — including ours — at moder-
ate prices." The notion of having a really
first-rate statue, casts from which should
supersede " the wretched Munich things

1 64 Coventry Pat more

Catholics now have to put up with," eagerly
commended itself to him. He saw Woolner
on the subject, and Mr. Thornycroft himself,
but the idea, so eminently practical and
felicitous, unhappily came to nothing. I
believe that Cardinal Newman once made,
equally in vain, an identical suggestion.

In February 1883, Patmore lost his youngest
son, Henry, a promising young man of less
than three-and-twenty, in whom several of
the characteristics of the father were re-
peated, and in particular a distinct gift of
verse. Henry Patmore was steeped in the
psychological mysteries of his father's con-
versation ; his appearance was marred by
his sickliness. He was tenaciously silent in
company, and not what is called " attrac-
tive," yet evidently a studious, pious, and
talented lad, whose future would probably
have been brilliant. His little volume of
Poems, arranged by his father, with a
touching memoir by his sister, Gertrude, now
Mrs. Watts, was published at Oxford in
April 1884. These circumstances, and the
death of an elder daughter, who was a nun in

Last Tears (1870-189 6) 165

a convent, increased, about this time, the
gravity and grimness of the poet, but without
radically disturbing his serene inner life.
That Henry's talents had not had an occa-
sion to ripen was a disappointment to him ;
but he wrote, " I feel prouder and gladder of
his innocent and dutiful life than if he had
been the greatest poet of the age."

In 1884 the tide of detraction which had so
long swept over Patmore's fame as a poet ebbed
away. In several of the leading reviews there
appeared articles in which the excellence
of his work was more or less intelligently
dwelt upon, and in which the importance
of The Unknown Eros was emphasized.
Through the period of his strange obscuration,
Patmore had shown a dignified patience ;
but the neglect had not lasted long enough
to sour him. The praise of the critics, the
tributes which now began to flow in upon
him from younger writers, gave him pure
pleasure. In this year I saw more of him
than ever, for he had determined that I was
to be his literary executor, and he had to
explain at great length his wishes regarding

1 66 Coventry Patmore

MSS. and books. From this agreeable but
responsible duty he afterwards released me,
on the very sensible ground that it was more
conveniently fitted to a member of his own
communion. The arrangements I speak of
— which came to nothing — were hurried on
in consequence of a rather serious illness,
which reduced his spirits very greatly, and
from the effects of which he perhaps never
wholly recovered. In June 1883, on a very
hot day, he was unguarded enough to sleep
for a couple of hours, stretched in the shadow
of Bodiam Castle, a picturesque but highly
malarious ruin on a small lake in the north of
Sussex. As Patmore put it, the courtyard
of this structure was " a cauldron of un-
wholesome marsh-air," which laid him up
with a sharp attack of ague, and made him
regard his future with a jaundiced eye.

The increase in public appreciation of his
work was now steady. In the summer of
1886 an illustrated edition of The Angel in
the House was projected, and Mr. Frank
Dicksee and Mr. Alfred Parsons were asked to
undertake it. As, however, these artists were

Last Years (187 0-189 6) 167

found to be too deeply engaged, and as Pat-
more, with characteristic decision, said that it
must be " those bodies or no bodies," the
scheme fell through. But in collected and
selected editions, cheap and dear, his poems
now once more sold in great abundance ; and
with new prose his pen was kept relatively-
busy. In 1 88 1, Miss Harriet Robson, long a
valued friend of the family, became his third
wife, and presently the birth of a son in his
old age gave the sequestered poet infinite occa-
sions for fresh hopes and interests. And thus,
to quote his own words, he remained " for
several years, singularly happy, if to have
friends, a fair competence, a rising family of
extraordinary promise, and no history^ is to be
happy." And then an event occurred, to
which, although it was purely of the intellec-
tual order, I am inclined to attribute a critical
importance in his career.

Since 1881 Patmore had been engaged on a
prose work, called Sfonsa Dei, which was in
strict accordance with, and illustrated the
same moods as The Unknown Eros. I had
received minute instructions as to the publi-

1 68 Coventry Pat jn ore

cation of this book, which he had directed me,
in case I survived him, to issue at a certain time
after his decease. He must have completed
the MS., I suppose, in 1883. An incident of
a very startling nature disturbed this plan.
On January 30, 1888, when I had been staying
a day or two with Patmore at Hastings, he
said to me at breakfast, abruptly, almost hys-
terically, " You won't have much to do as my
literary executor ! " and then proceeded to
announce that he had burned the entire MS.
of Sponsa Dei on the previous Christmas Day.
His family knew nothing of this holocaust,
and the ladies immediately cried, " O papa,
that is why you have been so dreadfully de-
pressed since Christmas ! " I said little at the
moment, but when I was alone with him in the
study, I asked him if he seriously meant what
he had stated. He replied yes, that it was all
destroyed, every scrap of it, every note, except
one page, which he had published in 1887 in
the " St. James's Gazette." He had come to
the conclusion that, although wholly ortho-
dox, and proceeding no further than the
Bible and the Breviary permitted, the world

hast Years (i 870-1 896) 169

was not ready for so mystical an interpretation
of the significance of physical love in religion,
and that some parts of the book were too
daring to be safely placed in all hands.

It appeared that it was at the advice of a
remarkable man of imperfect genius, Father
Gerard Hopkins, that the act had been per-
formed. When it was too late, Hopkins
wished that he had been more guarded in
making his reflexions. But he had placed
before Patmore the dilemma of having either
to burn the book or to show it to his director,
and the latter alternative was offensive to the
poet's pride.

The S'ponsa Dei, this vanished master-
piece, was not very long, but polished and
modulated to the highest degree of perfection.
No existing specimen of Patmore's prose seems
to me so delicate, or penetrated by quite so
high a charm of style, as this lost book was. I
think that, on successive occasions, I had read
it all, much of it more than once, and I suppose
that half a dozen other intimate friends may
have seen it. The subject of it was certainly
audacious. It was not more nor less than an

170 Coventry Patmore

interpretation of the love between the soul
and God by an analogy of the love between a
woman and a man ; it was, indeed, a transcen-
dental treatise on Divine desire seen through
the veil of human desire. The purity and
crystalline passion of the writer carried him
safely over the most astounding difficulties,
but perhaps, on the whole, he was right in
considering that it should not be thrown to
the vulgar. Yet the scruple which destroyed it
was simply deplorable ; the burning of Sfonsa
Dei involved a distinct loss to literature.

From this time, although the change may
not have been obvious to those who saw him
daily, Coventry Patmore was an altered man.
He began to grow old ; he gradually lost the
buoyant, joyous temperament which had been
to him " the bliss of solitude." His judgment,
which had always been violent, became warped,
the expression of his preferences took an
exaggerated form. He was none the less a
delightful and stimulating companion, but he
gave no longer the impression of inward seren-
ity. This modification of his temperament
proceeded slowly, but I do not think that the

Last Yem^s (1870-189 6) 171

existence of it could be denied. In the summer
of 1889 he reprinted from the " Fortnightly-
Review " and the " St. James's Gazette "
about thirty picked essays under the title of
Princi-ple in Art ; this was a charming little
book, extraordinarily finished in form and sug-
gestive in ideas ; most of it was written before the
destruction of Sponsa Dei. In bringing it out,
Patmore was amusingly defiant of criticism ; he
put his back to the wall and expected no mercy.
He wrote, in a letter (June 17, 1889), the re-
viewers "will say, or at least feel, 'Ugh, ugh! the
horrid thing ! It's alive ! ' and think it their
duty to set their heels on it accordingly." I
think he was positively disappointed at the
warmth and respect with which it was received
by the press. When, a year later, one was
recommended to look out for an article in the
approaching " Fortnightly Review," where
" by way of a spree, I have run a-muck against
everything and everybody," one trembled,
and not perhaps without cause. Patmore's
latest serious utterances are to be discovered
in two later volumes, Religio Poetae, 1893, and
T^he Rod, the Root, and the Flower, 1895, where,

172 Coventry Patmore

in company with much that is wholly charac-
teristic and perennially valuable, there is min-
gled not a little which savours, I think, of the
aimless violence and preposterous paradox of
failing power in a very original mind. And
if anything could possibly console us for the
loss of so majestic a spirit and so dear a friend,
it would be the conviction that his work was
done.

He meant to lead the rest of his life at
Hastings, in the house which he loved so much.
He had a lease of it renewable every seven
years, but at the end of the fourteenth year, in
1889, he asked the agent to change the tenure
to an annual one. He did this, as he explained
to me at the time, " in provision for the possi-
bility of my dying and leaving my wife burth-
ened with a long lease of a house much too
large for her." The agent consented, but in
1 89 1 the proprietor, — a ward in lunacy, — died,
and the new owner immediately gave Patmore
notice to quit, although it was represented to
him in the strongest terms that there had
been an understanding that the poet was not to
be disturbed. Patmore loudly lamented " the

Last Years (187 0-189 6) 173

immense trouble and loss to me in various
ways, I having built a big Church opposite
my door, invested the greater part of my
money in local property," etc., etc. The law,
however, was inexorable, and he had to go.

At Michaelmas, 1891, he quitted Hastings
and was lucky enough to find a house that
exactly suited him at Lymington. It was a
bluish building, standing coyly askew among
trees, very retired and dowdy-looking, on a
muddy point of land opposite the Isle of
Wight. There were passages, winding stair-
cases, raised landings, secret panels, thirty-
five rooms all a little shrouded and sombre,
but with enchanting views over the bright,
tidal expanses. At the back of it stretched
three acres of garden, rather dolefully over-
weighted with trees, green glades that led to
pathless wastes, yew hedges, steep grass borders,
empty hollows, and no flowers at all. Pat-
more's fancy was inflamed with the oddities
of this queer place, which he declared, authori-
tatively, to be the most desirable estate in the
county of Hampshire. That there was but
one post a day, no delivery of newspapers, no

174 Coventry Patmore

Sunday trains, a toll of a halfpenny and a
voyage in a ferry-boat on every excursion into
the town, and a hundred little drawbacks of
this kind, were, he declared, merely just
what was wanted to make life at Lymington
absolutely perfect.

During the last four years, years of con-
siderable bodily suffering, borne with great
resolution, the central fact in his life was
certainly the devoted affection of a friend, of
genius singularly cognate with his own.
I can, however, but lament that Mrs. Meynell
knew him intimately solely in that solemn
close of his life, in which he seemed, as Mr.
Francis Thompson has said of him, to have
drunk

•'The Moonless mere of sighs,
And paced the places infamous to tell,
Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes.

So, emphatically, does his image not appear in
memory to those who were close to him in the
unruffled and ensphered intensity of his middle
Hfe.

His fatal complaint, which was angina
pectoris, gave him many warnings and long

Last Years (i 870-1 896) 175

periods of respite before the end came sud-
denly. A little act of imprudence, the result
of a sense of unusual health, led to an attack
in the early morning of November 24, 1896,
and on the 26th, after an illness which was
scarcely painful, and through which he was
conscious of all the consolations of his re-
ligion, he passed away, in a cardiac syncope,
in his house at Lymington. He was nearly
half-way through his seventy-fourth year.
Almost to the last hour he gave interesting
evidence of the clearness of his intellect and
the vigour of his will.

Chapter VI

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

THERE can be no question that at the
present day too much attention is fre-
quently given to the little acts and
oddities of those whose real import-
ance lies entirely in their productions. Our
biographies tend to become anecdotages, and
what is essential is lost in a tiresome record of
what is accidental. The tendency of modern
society is to take away the salient and the sur-
prising elements from the lives of those whose
chief mission is an intellectual or a moral one,
and there is little that is not trivial or mono-
tonous to record about most of our poets and
philosophers. But to this rule every age pro-
duces eminent exceptions, and of these Coven-
try Patmore was one. To deal exclusively
with his verses or, as some have wished to do,
to soften into mediocrity the violent lines of
his personal character, would be to stultify our
aim. If we wish to preserve for posterity an

176

Coventry Patmore.

Ffom the Poiirait hy J . S. Sar^ent^ R.A. (1894) nc7v in the XntiottaJ
Portrait Gallery.

[Reproduced from "The Work of John S. S.irgciit, R.A.,"
bvkind Dcniiission of Mr. William Hciiieiiiann.]

Personal Characteristics 177

opportunity to study this extraordinary man,
it is necessary that we should preserve with
care the character of his person as well as that
of his works. In dwelling faithfully upon what
he was, those who observed him closely are not
merely justified in setting forth their observa-
tions, but have a duty so to do. Patmore him-
self would have been the first to insist upon this
fidelity. He was not one of those who wish the
truth to be smothered in foolish posthumous
flatteries ; he never desired to see the forms
of vitality attenuated, but always reinforced.
His grim ghost will not rise to upbraid the
biographer who strives to paint him exactly as
he was.

The central impression which long impact
with the mind of Coventry Patmore produced
was that here was an example, — possibly the
most remarkable example in England at that
time, — of the intellectual and moral aristocrat.
To no other man of his age was the general
trend of the nineteenth century towards uni-
formity and solidarity so detestable as it was to
Patmore. The give and take of modern tolera-
tion, the concentrated action of masses of men,

12

178 Cove7ttry Pat more

whose units fit into one another, meant abso-
lutely nothing to him. He would abandon
no privilege for the general convenience ; he
watched the modern instinct warring against
the solitary person, instinctively so hateful to
democracies, and he defied it. Defiance was
not a burden to him ; he was " ever a fighter,"
requiring for complete mental health the
salubrious sensation of antagonism. But even
here he was not pleased to face the crowd ; he
disliked its presence. His notion of fighting
was to " fire his ringing shot and pass." He
was a militant hermit of the soul, and it was as
a hermit-thrush that he poured out his songs —
for himself : —

Therefore no 'plaint be mine

Of listeners none,

No hope of rendered use or proud reward,

In hasty times and hard ;

But chants as of a lonely thrush's throat

At latest eve,

That does in each calm note

Both joy and grieve ;

Notes few and strong and fine.

Gilt with sweet day's decline.

And sad with promise of a different sun.

'Mid the loud concert harsh

Of this fog-folded marsh.

Pe?'so7iaI Characteristics 179

To me, else dumb,

Uranian Clearness, come !

Give me to breathe in peace and in surprise

The light-thriU'd ether of your rarest skies.

A certain hauteur to which, these, like so
many of his verses, testify, characterized Pat-
more in all the words and actions of his life.
No one could enter the circle of his conversa-
tion without perceiving his pride in a sense of
the distance which divided him, and those
whom he esteemed, from the crowd, the vast,
indefinite 'plehs whom he disdained. His very
cordiality, the charming sweetness of his affec-
tion, took a lustre from this general hauteur,
since the few who were received within the
wicket, who were allowed to share the sublime
and embattled isolation, were flattered in their
inmost nature by so gracious a partiality.
He had a very strong sense of inequality.
Without anything overtly arrogant, he was
irresistibly conscious of a sort of supernatural
superiority in himself. He would never have
admitted it in words, perhaps because he would
expect no sensible person to deny it. He was
serene and kindly, but aloof ; he was like a king
in exile. He had something of the conduct of

i8o Coventry Patmore

a. dethroned monarch, of one who does not ex-
pect homage or wish for it, but who knows that
his ideas are sovereign and his claims invulner-
able.

His attitude to life, — at all events until the
sad reverberation of his last years, — gave a
constant impression of accumulated energy,
a sense of plenitude. His temper was not
parasitical, he did not lean on others or need
them ; he could stand quite alone. In speak-
ing and in acting he preserved a strong sense
of his own value. It was absolutely necessary
to his temperament to run his own race, to
speak his own thought. To quote his very
words, again, he held that

Much woe that man befalls

Who does not run when sent, nor come when Heaven calls ;

But whether he serve God, or his own whim.

Not matters, in the end, to any one but him ;

And he as soon

Shall map the other side of the Moon,

As trace what his own deed.

In the next chop of the chance gale, shall breed.

This was Patmore's last word to time-
servers, to those who bid him beware lest, in
his wilfulness, doing and saying this or that, it

Personal Characteristics i 8 i

might ultimately lead to that or this. He did
not care in the very least, and when gentle
friends like Aubrey de Vere entreated him to
be circumspect and to spare the weaker bre-
thren, Patmore turned from them in com-
passionate surprise.

If we study this mental attitude more closely,
we find that it denoted the exercise of a sin-
gular moral independence. Patmore is not
comprehended unless we realize that he de-
liberately arrogated to himself the right to
perform certain intellectual acts which were
of an exceptional nature. It appears to me
that throughout his whole life in maturity he
was training himself to absolute liberty in
matters of will, although at the same time, by
a paradox which must presently be faced, re-
maining strictly obedient to the laws of the
Church of Rome. This led him to an ingenu-
ity of expression which sometimes appeared
casuistical, but there was no real inconsistency.
His independence enabled him to believe that
he was never driven along paths which seemed
those of obedience and renunciation, but that
his spirit leaped ahead to obey before the order

I 8 2 Coventry Patmore

was given and to renounce in joy before the
temptation was formulated.^ His attitude to
certain persons within his own communion
showed how anxious he was that his freedom
should not be tampered with. The hot flame
of the tyrannicide burned in his breast, and he
was ready to destroy any one who threatened
his individual independence.

In this connexion, nothing is more amusing
than his life-long antipathy to Cardinal
Manning, in whom, as by an instinct, he
perceived the tyrant, the oppressor of others'
will. Patmore never faltered for a mo-
ment about Manning, whom he described
as being " as ignorant as a child in matters
of philosophy, although his attitude on such
questions was always arrogantly dogmatic."
Mr. Basil Champneys has given a series of very
amusing anecdotes and sayings which betray
Patmore's undying hatred of Manning, whom,
moreover, he once defined to me as " the worst
type in history of the priest-ridden atheist."
This, no doubt, was an example of what Mr.
Champneys excellently calls Patmore's habit
of " expressing himself in words which ex-

Personal Characteristics 183

ceeded rather than fell short of his actual sen-
timents." But it exemplified his passionate
and temperamental dislike of Manning, which,
without question, was fostered by certain per-
sonal incidents connected with Patmore's first
and second marriages, but which I believe to
have been yet mainly due to a partly uncon-
scious sense of Manning's dangerous and in-
sidious tendency to enslave the human will.

One of the later Fathers speaks of " that ex-
treme indifference of the human will when
once it has been reduced and liquefied into the
will of God." Catholic metaphysic does not
say that the soul acquiesces in God's will,
because this would imply an act declaring its
consent. There must be no act, but a total
resignation, an extreme submission, what St.
Fran9ois de Sales calls " le despouillement par-
faict de I'ame unie a la volonte de Dieu." Pat-
more had attained a consciousness of some-
thing like this long before he became a Catholic.
In 1862, after his first wife's death and while
he was still within the Anglican communion,
he believed that God had suddenly conferred
upon him " that quiet personal apprehension

184 Coventry Patmore

and love of Him and entire submission to His
will " for which he had so long prayed in vain.
This conviction survived the crisis which
took him over to Rome, and became greatly-
strengthened and extended.

The paradox which seems offered to us by
the steady and humble faith of a man Hke
Patmore in religious matters, and his extreme
self-confidence in everything else, is more
apparent than real. Having satisfied him-
self to the full on the great spiritual question,
being troubled by no species of doubt about
that, his will was free to exercise itself with the
utmost freedom in all mundane directions.
If you firmly believe that your volition is
melted into God's, there is no difficulty in
supposing that if you find yourself wishing for
something or approving something, that thing is
also approved by God. Patmore made a tremen-
dous effort not to allow the conventions of reli-
gion to compromise his will, and, once convinced
of the rightness of his central orthodoxy, he had
no superstition about the human arrangements
of his faith. He was always wide-awake to the
dangers of theological charlatanry, and his out-

Personal Characteristics 185

spoken remarks on this subject were wont to
amuse his friends and to scandalize strangers.
His careful biographer has spoken of " the con-
stant depreciation of the moral character of
the priesthood " in which Patmore indulged.
In the last letter of his life he referred to Omar
Khayyam's disdain of priests with high ap-
proval.^ He took an absolute pleasure in the

1 The whole of the vigorous letter in which this remark
was made seems worthy of publication upon various grounds.
It was written less than a week before he died. Patmore
wrote it to explain why he was obliged to withdraw from
a promise he had made to come up to London to attend
a dinner-party. The vivacity and intellectual force of the
language are remarkable in a dying man in his seventy-
fourth year : —

Lymington, Nov. 17, 1896.
My dear Gosse, —

I am quite a cripple to-day with sciatica. I am so sorry
I cannot come.

I admire FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam greatly ; but
a comparison of FitzGerald's translation vdth some passages
of a literal prose translation by Charles Pickering, in one of
the magazines two or three years ago, convinced me that
FitzGerald had mistaken the meaning in some important
points.

Nearly all Eastern poetry is more or less mystical and
ascetic ; and wine, love and liberty seem to me, in this
Poem, to be words for spiritual passions and apprehensions,

I 8 6 Coventry Pat?nore

incongruity between the lofty vocation of
these agents of grace and the frailties and
defects of their personal conduct.

It is true that, as his closest friend has said,
Patmore's " most severe attacks upon the
priests were as often as not prompted by a
rather mischievous humour which led him to
delight in shocking those " who adopted the
view that all priests should be regarded as
immaculate.

Mr. Basil Champneys quotes a dialogue
which he overheard between Patmore and a
timid member of his own communion, who
was, the poet thought, too feebly subjected to
a supernatural awe of priests : —

Visitor. Weren't you surprised, Mr. Pat-
more, to hear of Church being burnt ? I

can't imagine how it could have happened.

though FitzGerald has so translated it as to ignore and
sometimes to deny this fact.

He has been right, however, in giving a literal intention
to what concerns Priests and formal religion. All Poets
and Prophets have hated Priests, — as a class, — and it has
been their vocation, from the beginning, to expose " Ecclesi-

asticism."

Yours ever,

Coventry Patmore.

Personal Characteristics 187

Patmore. I know very well how it hap-
pened.

Visitor. Oh, I do so wish you'd tell me how.

Patmore. The priests burnt it.

Visitor. Why, what on earth should they
have done that for ?

Patmore. To get the insurance money.

After this a dead pause, then : —

Visitor. Weren't you sorry to hear that
Father was dead ?

Patmore. No, I was very glad.

One hears the very voice of Patmore in this
amusing conversation, so admirably reported.
More serious in its scope, but of exactly the
same kind, was his independence with respect
to the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Patmore
accepted it in principle, absolutely, without
discussion ; but when it came to Pope Pius
IX's glosses upon it, he swept these away
as " merely personal opinions of an amiable
old gentleman, by which I am in no degree
bound."

The same haughty independence marked
his attitude towards the practical discipline
of his Church. He was a mystic, indeed,

I 88 Coventry Patmore

of the highest class, but he declined to accept
the ordinary paths to ecstasy. At one point
he was admirably original, and this claims
attention in any critical survey of his character.
The typical mystic has no pity for his wretched
body. In the practices of a vehement peni-
tence, he reduces his physical condition to a
transparency through which alone, as he
supposes, the sacred light can shine. It is
in ceaseless maceration, in a cloud of fatigue
and anguish, in voluntary tribulations in-
flicted without mercy, that the saints of this
extravagant type obtain their visions. St.
Christina the Admirable broke the ice of
wells in winter with blows of her forehead,
and was rewarded by an ecstasy in which she
experienced the seven sorrows of the Passion.
She was an example, like so many others of
her class, of a holiness which finds no access
to the Divine until it can break down the
walls of the vile cottage, " battered and
decayed," which we name the body.

For this kind of penitential hysteria Pat-
more had the greatest possible disdain, and
he held that if a man cannot dream without

Personal Characteristics 189

starving himself, it is better not to dream at
all. In the face of the most extraordinary
stories of perfection obtained through vexing
corporeal penitences, he remained unmoved.
Frankly, he disliked the sterile ideas of re-
morse and despair which underlie these ex-
travagances, and he suspected a course of
discipline which reduced people to a state
of extreme physical exhaustion. He was in
nothing more original and daring than in
his glorification of the Body. When the
mystics had done pouring contempt and
hatred upon it, he took his turn and addressed
it as —

Creation's and Creator's crowning good ;

Wall of infinitude ;

Foundation of the sky,

In Heaven forecast,

And longed for from eternity . .

Reverberating dome,

Of music cunningly-built home

Against the void and indolent disgrace

Of unresponsive space ;

Little sequestered pleasure-house >

For God and for His spouse.

We need feel no surprise that the poet who
could thus address the human body was

190 Cove7itry Patmore

anxious not to confound the lovely vision
which he himself enjoyed with the haggard
and hysterical results of exhaustion and im-
poverishment. In his intrepid private con-
versation, Patmore never hesitated to pour
scorn upon the anaemic ideal of the ordinary
Catholic visionary.

In order to obtain the full effects of imagina-
tion in its active state, and to enjoy undis-
turbed his ecstatic visions of the soul's mystic
union with God, Patmore was in the habit
of withdrawing to some monastery for a certain
part of each year. The custom of going into
" retreat " is a common one among pious
persons, who seek a period of retirement that
they may devote themselves to self-examina-
tion and to special prayer. Patmore, who
did nothing like other people, did not under-
stand his *' retreats " in this sense. He started
forPontypool or Pantasaph as a hardly-worked
man starts for a holiday. He was wont to
arrive among the monks in the highest animal
spirits, — as he himself said, " quite Mark
Tapley-ish." He was a welcome guest at a
monastery, and I suppose that he appeared on

Personal Characteristics 191

these occasions at his very best. He laughingly-
used to complain that the monks fed him up
as if he were a pig being fattened for the fair.
Presently his spirits would sober down ; he
would become impatient of seeing too much
of his innocent hosts, and the real business
of the " retreat " would begin. He would
wrap himself round with solitude, until he
experienced great joy and rest in his calm sur-
roundings ; then he would set himself to
consider God in several of His infinite per-
fections. I recollect Patmore's making a
distinction between meditation and contem-
plation. He remarked very justly, that
meditation was a painful business, attended
by labour and travail of the mind. These
monastic " retreats " were occasions of rest,
and he liked his thoughts to float passively on
a stream of contemplation. Throughout, in
these retirements, he preserved a wholesome
and gay severity, without any species of reli-
gious pedantry.

The openness of his mind, where his curious
prejudices did not happen to interfere, was
always noticeable. His sympathy embraced

192 Coventry Patmore

Emerson, Swedenborg, Pascal and even Scho-
penhauer. With some of these it might
seem difficult to connect the tastes of Patmore
in any reasonable degree. But in the case
of Swedenborg he was attracted by the
closeness of his visionary teaching to that of
the Catholic Church, although it was reached
from an opposite point of view. " I never
tire of reading Swedenborg," Patmore wrote ;
" he is unfathomably profound and yet simple.
I came on a passage . . . which I don't know
how to admire enough for its surpassing in-
sight into truth and for its consistence with
and development of Catholic truth. . . . You
will think it all very odd at first, but, after
you have got used to the queerness, you will
find that it abounds with perception of the
truth to a degree unparalleled perhaps in
uninspired writing." What pleased him in
Pascal was the splendid evidence that great
thinker gives of the possibility of conciliating
faith and reason in their fullest sense. With
the scorn of Pascal for the Jesuit Fathers, for
their political piety and their casuistical morals,
Patmore had an instinctive sympathy. When

Personal Characteristics 193

he himself was reproved for boldness in his
expressions about the mysteries of the faith,
he could hardly have found words which
would better express his feelings than those
in which Pascal rebuffed the suggestion that
he should withdraw the Provinciates. So
might Patmore have replied, about his own
Psyche odes, " Loin de m'en repentir, si
j'etais a les faire, je les ferais encore plus
fortes."

A certain pessimism in general matters,
united to or imposed upon his extraordinary
optimism in particular instances, led Patmore
to sympathize with those who have despaired
of the system of human institutions. He
was drawn with a vehement attraction to the
dark philosophy of Schopenhauer, of whom
he was one of the earliest students in this
country. The tremendous effort v/hich
Patmore was always making to prevent his
religious faith from compromising his intellec-
tual judgment enabled him to tolerate the
apparent atheism in the German philosopher's
system. But it is very curious to notice that
Patmore, like Nietzsche long afterwards (in

13

194 Coventry Patmore

1888), recognized in Schopenhauer an element
which his general readers were far from
observing. Each of them, from his diametri-
cally opposite view, instinctively detected
what was still Christian in Schopenhauer, and
observed how much he continued to be
dominated by Christian formulas. There is
something humorous in finding an intellectual
opinion shared in isolation by Patmore and
— by Nietzsche ! But the bellicose element in
the former would probably have found some-
thing to sympathize with even in the violence
of the latter.

In the ordinary intercourse of life it was
impossible that Patmore should not be fre-
quently misunderstood by those who did not
appreciate his humour or who had no sense
of fun themselves. He was mischievously
contradictory, paradoxical and arbitrary, and
he had a violent hatred for " sentimental
faddists, humanitarians, anti-tobacconists and
teetotalers." Yet he could be extremely
sentimental himself ; he was gentle and in-
dulgent to animals ; and few men of his
generation indulged more sparingly in the

Personal Characteristics 195

legitimate stimulus of wine. But in all these
movements he saw an interference with per-
sonal freedom of action, a thing for which he
was disposed to fight in the last trench. He
was like the late Archbishop Magee, he would
rather see England free than England sober.
He pushed his argument to an extreme : —

" The bank-holidays," he wrote, " are a
prodigious nuisance. The whole population
of England seems now to be chronically-
drunk every Saturday, Sunday and Monday,
Feast-day or Fast. It is very lucky. Nothing
but universal drunkenness among the labour-
ing classes can keep them from making use,
i.e. abuse, of the new political power. It will
be an unhappy day for England when the
mechanic takes to becoming a sober, respect-
able man."

These are dark sayings, for Patmore was

One, with the abysmal scorn of good for ill,
Smiting the brutish ear with doctrine hard,

but they will not be misunderstood by any
one who has mastered the political doctrine of
the Odes^ and who recognizes that Patmore
believed our only hope of temporary ^national

196 Coventry Patmore

happiness to exist in stopping or hampering
the results of the legislation of 1867. "^^
him the effect of extended suffrage was in-
evitably an " unsanctioned" guidance of the
ship of State : —

helmless on the swelling tide
Of that presumptuous sea,
Unlit by sun or moon, yet inly bright
With lights innumerable that give no light,
Flames of corrupted will and scorn of right,
Rejoicing to be free.

He had an exaggerated way of saying all
things, great and small. If he heard a black-
cap singing in the garden it become at
once a nightingale, and in describing it
a few hours later it became " a chorus of jive
or six nightingales." He could not moderate
his praise or blame. Instances of the latter
have been given ; one of the former, very
characteristic, occurs to me. In the presence
of a number of men of letters, Patmore men-
tioned an accomplished writer who was an
intimate friend of his. The conversation
passed to the lyrical poems of Herrick, where-
upon Patmore, in his most positive manner,
exclaimed, " By the side of , Herrick was

Personal Characteristics 197

nothing but a brilliant insect ! " There was
a universal murmur of indignant protest.
Patmore pursed up his lips, blinked his eyes
and said nothing. The conversation pro-
ceeded, and an opinion of Goethe's was
presently quoted. Then Patmore lifted up

his voice and cried : — " By the side of ,

Goethe was nothing but a brilliant insect ! "
This was an instance of the blind violence
of his humour, perhaps at its worst. It was
an attempt to take opinion by storm and to
triumph over the bewilderment of his audi-
tors ; and truly, in analysing such prepos-
terous utterances, it was often difficult to
know how much was conscious fun and how
much mere daredevil wilfulness.

His humour often took the form of epigrams
or lampoons, by far the most famous of which
was that which he wrote in August, 1870, on
occasion of the Emperor William's famous
telegram from Woerth : —

This is to say, my dear Augusta,
We've had another awful buster :
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below !
Thank God from whom all blessings flow.

1 9 B Coventry Patmore

Less known is a quatrain which he threw off
on finding his mystical poems misunderstood
by certain commonplace members of his own
communion : —

A bee upon a briar-rose hung

And wild with pleasure suck'd and kiss'd ;

A flesh-fly near, with snout in dung,
Sneer'd, " What a Transcendentalist ! "

Nor did he spare Science, with which in
later years he had entirely lost his early sym-
pathy : —

Science, the agile ape, may well

Up in his tree thus grin and grind his teeth

At us beneath,

The wearers of the bay and asphodel.

Laughing to be his butts.

And gathering up for use his ill-aim'd cocoanuts .

There was some perversity in this also. He
disliked " gush," and there is a story of his
visiting Greenwich Observatory in company
with Aubrey de Vere. They were shown
through the telescope a new comet and other
fine things, which filled them both with
exultation, but De Vere unfortunately giving
voice to his enthusiasm about the bigness of
the starry heavens on the way home, Patmore

Personal Characteristics 199

suddenly " dried up," and maintained that the
stars were only created " to make dirt cheap."
He cultivated the habit of writing occasional
verses of compliment or humour, and it was
noticeable that, however slight these were,
they retained the general features of his
style. I am permitted to print, for the first
time, a playful address to a little girl, the
daughter of one of his friends, and it will be
observed that the technique of this trifle closely
resembles that of some of Patmore's most
mystical lyrics : —

To Miss Josephine Knowles,
A railway car, on Sandy Down,
With you, were Palace, Realm and Crown ;
And tripe and onions, cooked by you,
Ambrosia were and honey-dew ;
Whene'er you spin upon your bike,
I'll trot behind, your faithful tyke.
Water inflames a mighty fire.
So shall I but the more admire,
The more you jump the old world's traces
With such exasperating graces ;
Yea, every Tory taste I'll banish,
The moment Josephine turns mannish,
And if I write more poetry,
" The Angel on the Bike " 'twill be !

C. P.
Feb., 1896.

2 00 Coventry Patmore

The personal appearance of Coventry Pat-
more has, most fortunately, been secured
for posterity by the art of one of the most
gifted of living artists, Mr. John S. Sargent,
R.A. Patmore had a great admiration for
Mr. Sargent's work ; he wrote : — " He seems
to me to be the greatest, not only of living
English portrait painters, but of all English
portrait painters." This was certainly a very
happy spirit in which to approach the studio,
and this enthusiastic appreciation survived
vhe weariness of " sittings." These began
in June 1894, and on September 7 Patmore
announced the completion of the work as
follows : " As you were instrumental in getting
the portrait done, I ought to tell you that it is
now finished to the satisfaction, and far more
than satisfaction, of every one — including the
painter — who has seen it. It will be, simply
as a work of art, the picture of the Academy,"
where, indeed, in 1895, it attracted universal
admiration. In the same month of Septem-
ber 1894, Mr. Sargent, saying that he had
only done half of Patmore as yet, painted a
second portrait, and later on the poet came

Personal Characteristics 201

up to town to sit for the Prophet Ezekiel in
that great decorative composition which Mr.
Sargent was painting for the Boston Library.
There are, therefore, three portraits — the most
important of them already transferred to the
National Portrait Gallery — in which a hand of
consummate power has fixed for ever upon
canvas the apocalyptical old age of Coventry
Patmore.

Splendid as these portraits are, however,
and intimately true of the poet's latest phase,
it is necessary to insist that he was not always
thus ragged and vulturine, not always such
a miraculous portent of gnarled mandible and
shaken plumage. Mr. Basil Champneys gives
a sketch of him in the prime of life, at about
the age of forty : —

" It must, I think, have been early in 1864,
that walking from Hampstead to Highgate in
company with a friend who knew him, I caught
sight at the corner of Caen Wood of a sombre,
stately, solitary figure dressed in deep mourn-
ing. My friend introduced him as Mr. Coven-
try Patmore, and though but few words
passed, what little he said left an impression of

202 Coventry Patmore

sadness, gravity and extreme reticence, en-
tirely consonant to his appearance. He seemed
as one who had passed through poignant
sorrow with unimpaired manliness and with
increase of dignity. His personal appearance,
so far as I can recall it, was then a good deal
like the picture painted by Mr. John Brett
(in 1855), and the more salient characteristics
with which I was afterwards so familiar were
rather indicated than developed."

They had become much more developed
when I saw him first in 1879, but they were
still far from giving him that aspect of a wild
crane in the wilderness which Mr. Sargent's
marvellous portrait will pass down to posterity.
He was exceedingly unlike other people, of
course, even then, but his face possessed quite
as much beauty as strangeness. Three things
were in those days particularly noticeable in
the head of Coventry Patmore : the vast convex
brows, arched with vision ; the bright, shrewd,
bluish-grey eyes, the outer fold of one eyelid
permanently and humorously drooping ; and
the wilful, sensuous mouth. These three
seemed ever at war among themselves ; they

Personal Charactei^istics 203

spoke three different tongues ; they proclaimed
a man of dreams, a canny man of business, a
man of vehement physical determination. It
was the harmony of these in apparently dis-
cordant contrast which made the face so fas-
cinating ; the dwellers under this strange
mask were three, and the problem was how
they contrived the common life. The same
incongruity pervaded all the poet's figure.
When at rest, standing or sitting, he was
remarkably graceful, falling easily into languid,
undulating poses. No sooner did he begin
to walk than he became grotesque at once, the
long, thin neck thrust out, the angularity of
the limbs emphasized in every rapid, inelegant
movement. Sailing along the Parade at Hast-
ings, his hands deep in the pockets of his short,
black- velvet jacket, his grey curls escaping
from under a broad, soft wide-awake hat, his
long, thin legs like compasses measuring the
miles, his fancy manifestly " reaching to some
great world in ungauged darkness hid," Coven-
try Patmore was an apparition never to be
forgotten.

His relations with others partook of the

2 04 Coventry Pat more

incongruity which I have tried to note in his
personal appearance. On one side, Patmore
was sociable up to the very last, pleased to
meet strangers, to feel the movement of young
persons circling around him ; on another, he
was averse to companionship, a solitary, a
hermit. He loved the society of the ladies
of his family, but he was something of a
Pacha even there. They were not expected to
disturb his day dream, and sometimes he
brusquely shook them off him. Then he would
write to some male friend : " It would be a
charity if you would come down now and then
on Saturday and stay till Monday. I live all
my days in a wilderness of fair women, and I
long for some male chat." Or, in these moods,
he would break away altogether and come up
to town, descending suddenly on some active
friend, who would be always delighted, of
course, to see him, but embarrassed, in the
hurly-burly of business, to know what to do
with this grim pilgrim who would sit there
for hours, winking, blinking, smoking innu-
merable cigarettes, and saying next to nothing.
Little parties suddenly collected to meet

Personal Characteristics 205

Patmore at luncheon or dinner were found to
be the most successful form of entertainment ;
for though he would sometimes scarcely say a
word, or would wither conversation by some
paradox ending in a crackle and a cough, it was
discovered that he believed himself to have
been almost indecorously sparkling on these
occasions, and would long afterwards refer to a
very dull, small dinner as " that fearful dissi-
pation."

He was so very loyal to his restricted friend-
ships, that a fresh incongruity is to be traced
in the notorious fact that he had sacrificed
more illustrious friends on the altar of caprice
than any other man in England. He had been
intimate with Tennyson, Emerson, Browning,
Rossetti, Millais, and Woolner, yet each of
these intimacies ceased as time went on, and each
was broken off or dropped by Patmore. Hegota
reputation in some quarters for churlishness,
which it is not very easy to explain away, yet
which he did not quite deserve. The cessation
of these relationships was due to several causes.
In the cases of Tennyson, and in lesser measure
of Ruskin, the youthful spirit of idolatry had

2o6 Coventry Patmore

given place to a mature independence not so
agreeable to the idol. In some of these in-
stances, when the tie had become irksome,
it was snapped by what was called a " quarrel,"
an incident often of highly mysterious char-
acter. Every one who knew Patmore well has
heard him tell the story of his " quarrel " with
Tennyson. I was at pains to sift this anec-
dote, and was able to prove to my own satis-
faction that it could not have happened. It
was simply, I think, a casuistical mode of free-
ing Patmore's memory from the burden of
Tennyson's influence. In this connexion,
as Patmore's absence from Tennyson's funeral
has been commented on, I am glad to take
this opportunity of explaining it. Patmore
was so anxious to be present that he came to
London for the purpose, without waiting for
the indispensable card of invitation. This
latter was sent to Hastings by mistake, and
thence to Lymington, and thence to town,
reaching Patmore an hour after the ceremony
began in the Abbey. Two years before Tenny-
son's death, the old friends exchanged kindly
verbal greetings through a third person, but

Personal Characteristics 207

neither would write first to the other, and
they met no more.

Another cause for the rupture of certain
early friendships was religious sentiment. It
must never be forgotten that Patmore was
not merely a Catholic, but an enthusiastically
convinced and strenuous one. His conversion
to Rome severed many old ties, and he was not
anxious that these should be renewed. His
attitude to Rossetti was typical. He spoke
of no one with more heat of resentment than
of Rossetti ; I remember that, on occasion of
that poet's death, in 1882, I was bewildered
by Patmore's expressions. He drew himself
up in his chair, his eyes blazed, he was like the
Prophet Ezekiel in his denunciation. He
considered, so he explained, that Rossetti,
more than any other man since the great old
artist-age, had been dowered with insight
into spiritual mysteries, that the Ark of
passion had been delivered into his hands and
that he had played with it, had used it to
serve his curiosity and his vanity, had profaned
the Holy of Holies ; that he was Uzzah and
Pandarus, and that there was no forgiveness

2o8 Coventry Patmore

for him anywhere. And even Ruskin, though
in lesser degree, and with far less seriousness,
for the affection here lasted warmly to the end,
came in at times for fantastic denunciation. In
these sallies, fun and earnest were indissolubly
mixed, yet it was very far indeed from being
all fun.

Patmore's austerity being, as it was, strongly
emphasized by his candour of speech and
virile intellectual independence, it is well to
note that he was by no means, at least in the
Puritan sense, ascetic. Nor, although so pas-
sionately a Catholic in aU the fibres of his
being, did he limit his sympathies to his own
order. On the contrary, he was remarkably
ready to annex to Catholicism whatever he
approved of. The oddest example of this which
I recollect, was the remark, to which I have
already made some reference, which he once
made about the boudoir novelists of the
eighteenth century, CrebiUon -fils and La Mor-
liere and Voisenon, " They are not nearly so
vile as people pretend to think ; there is a
great deal that is Catholic in their conception
of love." And Plato had his Catholic touches

Personal Characteristics 209

in the Sym-posium^ and all the first pagan
rapture in physical beauty was Catholic too.
For a long time Patmore hesitated whether he
should hang on the low landing which faced
his front door at Hastings a life-size cast of the
Venus of Milo or a reproduction of the San
Sisto Madonna. The ladies of the household
much preferring the latter, it was at length
put up, but Patmore remarked to me, with a
sigh, " The Venus would have been at least as
Catholic." In all these instances he per-
ceived in the innocent, sensuous form a symbol
which but added a whispered and exterior
benediction to that solemn sacrament of
marriage, which held so lofty a place in his
conception of spiritual life. Greek sculptors,
poets of the Renaissance, even the Crebillons
of the world of patch and powder, seemed,
to his broad vision, like those wild men who
knelt in the narthex of an ancient Christian
church, though they might never penetrate
into the fane itself.

A singular characteristic of Patmore's, which
demands record, were his occasional bursts of
waggishness in reference to things which are

14

2 I o Coventry Patmore

not merely of solemn import, but to no one of
more genuine solemnity than to himself. He
once said to me, in this connexion, " No one
is thoroughly convinced of the truth of his
religion who is afraid to joke about it, just as no
man can tease a woman with such impunity as
he who is perfectly convinced of her love."
He did not scruple to invent Catholic legends,
some of which are now, we are told, in steady
circulation among the devout. In particular,
I remember a story about the dormouse, who
was created with a naked tail like a rat, but
who, seeing Adam and Eve eating the apple,
and being conscious of a sinful longing, pressed
what tail he had to his eyes to shut out temp-
tation. He was instantly rewarded by the not
very silky brush which has been the pride of
his descendants. This Patmore invented, cir-
culated, and had the exquisite pleasure, — so, at
least, he affirmed, — of seeing adopted into works
of Catholic tradition.

It is entertaining to those who knew Coven-
try Patmore well to hear him conjectured of
by those who never saw him as " mild " or
" namby-pamby." In point of fact, he was

Personal Characteristics 211

the most masterful of men, the very type of
that lofty, moral arrogance which antiquity
identified with the thought of Archilochus.
This partly essential, partly exterior tendency
to tyrannize, to be a law to himself and others,
to cut all knots whatsoever with a single, final
slash of that stringent tongue of his, was, indeed,
a snare to him. It obscured too often the sun-
shine of his sensitive tenderness, and in such
poems as " The Toys " and " If I were Dead "
a piteous proof is offered to us that he was con-
scious of this. His hand was apt to be too
heavy in reproof ; what to himself seemed
tempered by its humorous exaggeration fell
upon the culprit with a crushing weight.
And then Patmore would be sorry for his
anger, and angry with himself for being sorry,
until the fountains that should have been
sweet and clear were bitter and turbid with
conflicting emotion.

Rarely has a knowledge of the man been
more essential to the comprehension of his
writings than was the case with Coventry
Patmore. To understand the poems, some
vision of the angular, vivid, discordant, and

2 12 Coventry Patmore

yet exquisitely fascinating person who com-
posed them is necessary. During a great
portion of his life, the genius of Patmore was
under an almost unbroken cloud ; it was
the object of ridicule and rebuke ; even now,
when honour is generally paid to his name,
the extraordinary originality and force of his
best work is properly appreciated by but few.
It is my firm conviction that the influence of
Coventry Patmore, as the master-psychologist
of love, human and divine, is destined steadily
to increase, and that a future generation will
look back to him with a mingled homage and
curiosity when many of those whose doings now
fill the columns of our newspapers are for-
gotten. For, in this composite age of ours,
when all things and people are apt to seem
repetitions of people and things which amused
some previous generation, Coventry Patmore
contrived, unconsciously, to give the impres-
sion of being, like the Phoenix of fable, the
solitary specimen of an unrelated species.

Chapter VII

LITERARY POSITION AND ALMS

WHEN we take into consideration the
splendid ambition of Coventry Pat-
more and the prolonged duration of
his life, it is very curious to observe that he
never contrived to finish a single work. We
have seen that The Angel in the House, which
was to have consisted of six sections, was
dropped in 1863 at the conclusion of the
fourth. The present collection of odes en-
titled The Unknown Eros is but a chain of
stray fragments out of the poem on Divine
Love which as late as 1866 he was still
endeavouring to complete. Patmore's third
great design, the poem on the Marriage of
the Blessed Virgin, of which in 1870 he was
" laying the foundation broad and deep,"
never rose at all from its too-ambitious basis.
The causes of this failure to give complete
expression to his own genius were many. But

2 14 Coventry Patmore

the most important of them, I think, was the
excessive emotion which Patmore threw into
his imaginative experience. Other poets of
his age, notably Tennyson and Browning,
made poetry their business. They forced the
ecstasy they felt into the channels of their art,
and mastered it, instead of allowing it to
master them.

Patmore, though not less of a bard than these
men, was less of an artist. He had not the
gift of imaginative storage ; he could not, as
Tennyson did, ponder for weeks on the
execution of a theme, gradually building up
the structure of his poem. Patmore was in
his essence an improvisatore, only without the
lightness, the fluidity, of the improvisatore.
He improvised dark sayings, and flashed out
gnomic prophecies in his cave. But he could
only write when the intolerable inspiration
descended upon him, and he had no power of
storing poetic material. He excused his silence,
on one occasion, by saying that one song, or a
succession of songs, would not express what
he felt ; nothing but '' the simultaneous utter-
ance of many songs in different directions ''

Literary Positio72 and Aims 215

could serve to relieve his emotion, which was,
therefore, by a " mortal impossibility," stifled,
instead of flowing into melody. When the im-
pulse was upon him, he wrote with a tremendous
energy and self-gratulation, almost like a man
consciously breathed into by a god. But this
ecstasy could never be sustained, and in the
deep depression which followed the moment
of exaltation he sank to the belief that he was
" nothing but a miserable self-deluded poeta-
ster."

This, as the experienced reader will note,
is a symptom by which we diagnose the born
lyrist. This reaction, this agonized query,

where slept thine Ire,
When Hke a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,

Thy laurel, thy glory.

The light of thy story,
Or was I a worm, too low-creeping for death ?

O Delphic Apollo !

are the very signs-manual of the malady of the
accredited singer, who is lifted high only to be
dashed down the lower. It is to this tempera-
ment, without question, that we owe some of
those bursts of song which still stir the very
depths of our being after centuries of silence.

2 1 6 Coventry Patmore

But the curious thing is that Patmore never
recognized in himself the singerpureandsimple;
he desired to excel in epic, gnomic and didactic
poetry, and for success in these it is plain that
he had not the temperament. He never
realized this fact, and he even endeavoured to
explain away the evidences of it. It is impos-
sible to overlook the repeated occasions on
which he asserts that his writings were the
result of a prolonged effort of the intellect.
Evidently he wished that they should be, and
believed that they were. He wrote that every
one of his mature books had been written
" after many years of reflection on its subject,"
and in a sense this was doubtless true, but not
in the sense he intended. It was in a mood of
far juster self-observation that he spoke of
the " discovery of the mode of treating a
subject " being with him " co-instantaneous
with the actual composition." That is the true
experience of the lyrist, but this is not how
epic and philosophical poetry are written.

Patmore was painfully aware that inspira-
tion came to him fitfully and rarely, and that
it left him soon. A fine pride preserved him

Literary Position ana Aims 217

from going on for a moment after he was con-
scious that the sudden illumination had been
removed. His best things, he knew, had been
written most quickly ; several of his finest odes
in less than two hours each. His attitude to
poetry was very noble ; much as he longed
to express his mission, as he regarded it, he
would steadily maintain a literary conscience.
In 1868 he wrote, " Though, of course, I may
not be a competent judge of how good my
best is, I am sure that I have given the world
nothing but my best." He long hoped that
with age a greater freedom would settle upon
him ; that the heavenly visitant might be in-
duced to come oftener, and to stay longer. He
thought that each poet had a certain amount of
original poetry in him, and that if he did not
get it out of himself in his spring or summer,
he might hope to do so in his autumn. But
Patmore's autumn brought a more continuous
silence, and to the final edition of 1886 he
prefixed the proud simplicity of this brief
confession : —

" I have written little, but it is all my best ;
I have never spoken when I had nothing to say,

2 I 8 Coventry Patmore

nor spared time or labour to make my words
true. I have respected posterity, and, should
there be a posterity which cares for letters, I
dare to hope that it will respect me."

There is no question that Patmore was
sincere in this conception of his own artistic
rectitude, and it is true that he spent a great
deal of time in revising and altering what he had
written. But it was an epithet, the turn of a
phrase, or the arrangement of a rhyme that he
changed, and it was very curious that the
repeated editions of his early poetry continue
to present us with blemishes which are of an
essential kind. These were, in not a few in-
stances, pointed out to him by critical acquaint-
ances. Yet they were seldom removed. The
fact was that Patmore, with the best will in
the world, was unable to perceive them, and
when they were pointed out to him he defended
them, not with obstinate vanity, but with a
blank bewilderment. When the revival of
Patmore's fame began, about 1885, the new
generation of admirers, whose opinion was
founded upon Amelia and The Unknown Eros^
were somewhat scandalized at the connubial

Literary Position and Aims 219

vapidities of the plot of The Angel in the House,
One of the most ardent of these critics felt
obliged to insist upon the fact that " this
laureate of the tea-table, with his humdrum
stories of girls that smell of bread and butter,
is in his inmost heart the most arrogant and
visionary of mystics." That was all very well,
but Patmore, while accepting the second
clause of this statement, repudiated the former.
He could not be persuaded of its truth, although
it is no longer necessary to quote examples
of the extremely pedestrian narrative which
marred the early poems. They cannot be de-
fended, and the only interest they possess lies
in the fact that Patmore continued to defend
them. The matter is summed up in a witty, if
rather cruel, sentence by Dr. Garnett, when
he tells us that Patmore " had no perception
of the sublime in other men's writings or
of the ridiculous in his own."

In the early narrative poems, published at
intervals between 1844 and 1863, what is now
attractive to the reader is always the lyrical
setting. This is devoted almost exclusively to
an analysis of amatory instinct in its most

2 20 Coventry Patmore

guileless and paradisal forms. The portraiture
of woman as a sort of household Madonna is
carried through with great ingenuity. In those
days the conception of love which Patmore had
formed was still very simple ; it scarcely
passed beyond the worship of household beauty.
A recent French writer on English life, M.
Robert d'Humieres, has observed that our
nation rCaime 'pas la femme hors de sa maison,
and bases upon this cloistered habit certain re-
flections upon the chastity of English imagina-
tive literature. If there is some truth in this
observation, then that erotic idealism of respect
reaches its most intense expression in The Angel
in the House, and it is in this that the element
of lasting popularity in that poem resides.
Nor would the element be reduced by
the fact that Patmore's conception of this
reverence in love is not genuinely spiritual, but
physical and egotistical. This was what caused
him so great a confusion when he definitely
joined the Roman communion, since Catholic
doctrine looks askance at any expression of com-
plaisance with what is either sensual or mortal.
Patmore's ingenuity was able to discover a way

Literary Position and Ai77ts 221

out of his dilemma ; he persuaded himself that
his conception of love embraced a sentiment
of sacrifice accepted which endowed it with
spiritualit}^.

The reader of to-day will not be troubled
by such scruples, and for him the difficulty of
enjoying Patmore's early poems will be that of
being interested in virtue which is so tamely
happy and so easily rewarded. The household
atmosphere in these works is like that in some
of the domestic pictures of the period, an air
loaded with the perfume of pinks and sweet peas,
in some deep garden where no wind ever blows
and where it is always afternoon. The Vicar's
daughters arrive to play the old simple form
of early Victorian croquet ; their crinolines
cluster around the curate, who takes advantage
of that shelter to cheat a little when his turn
comes round ; there is a faint buzzing of
insects, the click of the mallets on the balls,
an innocent light-hearted chatter, and Mamma
is always not far off, in an easy chair, knitting
some object out of rainbow-coloured wools.
If a couple wanders off for a little while
among the currant bushes, it is only in response

22 2 Coventry Patmore

To urgent pleas and promise to behave
As She were there.

Between all this warm sweetness and the
sharp, glacial air of the Odes, there seems to lie
a chasm, but it is bridged over by Amelia^ in
several respects the most wonderful of Pat-
more's productions. It was written in four
days at the beginning of 1878, and is, therefore,
among the latest of his poetical writings. Not-
withstanding this fact, it must be treated as
a link between the narratives of the poet's
Protestant period, and the odes of Catholic
inspiration which date from 1864 onwards.

A word which has been very laxly used in
nineteenth-century criticism is exactly fitted to
describe Amelia. That poem is in the strictest
sense an idyll, a short ornamented narrative on a
rustic subject ; it belongs to the same rural
type as the Komastes of Theocritus, and it blends
in a like degree the character of the little epic
with that of the ode. Very few modern pieces
bear such happy trace of obedience to Words-
worth's direction that the poet should write
with his eye upon the object. The whole
atmosphere of Amelia, of its locality, of its

Literary Position ajid Ai^ns 2 2'^

ethics, of its language, of its landscape, is
strictly individual. To speak first of its locality,
though no place is mentioned, we identify at
once " the little, bright, surf-breathing town,"
that

Gathers its skirts against the gorse-lit down
And scatters gardens o'er the southern lea,

as unquestionably Hastings, and every slight
epithet that follows confirms the impression.
The landscape is not less clearly individual. As
the lovers walk through it, the scene takes
certain aspects which are neither accidental nor
indifferent, but each phase of which has its
moral significance. In the following passage,
the reader who does not seek to inquire deeply
may be charmed with the freshness of a spring
picture ; to the closer student every segment of
the description is charged with symbolism : —

And so we went alone,
By walls o'er which the lilac's numerous plume
Shook down perfume ;
Trim plots close blown
With daisies, in conspicuous myriads seen,
Engross'd each one

With single ardour for her spouse, the sun ;
Garths in their glad array

2 24 Coventry Patmore

Of white and ruddy branch, auroral, gay.
With azure chill the maiden flow'r between ;
Meadows of fervid green,
With sometime-sudden prospect of untold
Cowslips, like chance-found gold ;
And broadcast buttercups at joyful gaze,
Rending the air with praise.
Like the six-hundred-thousand voiced shout
Of Jacob camp'd in Midian put to rout ;
Then, through the Park,
Where Spring to livelier gloom
Quicken'd the cedars dark.
And, 'gainst the clear sky cold,
Which shone afar
Crowded with sunny alps oracular.
Great chestnuts raised themselves abroad Hke cliffs of
bloom.

The subject of Amelia is not less original
than its treatment. Never did a poet choose a
theme more perilous, or one which must depend
for its success more entirely on the sincerity of
his thought and the distinction of his language.
The hero of the poem is a man no longer
quite young, who has been betrothed (Patmore
shrank, perhaps judiciously, from saying married)
to a certain Millicent. She has died and has
been buried in the churchyard close by. After
a period of deep sorrow, he falls in love again,

luiterary Position and Aims 225

this time with one of a simple birth, and almost
a child, Amelia. On the earliest occasion when
her careful mother, a widow, allows him to
take Amelia for a walk, he conducts her over
the cliffs to the grave of Millicent. The
position is one eminently natural, eminently
pathetic, but it lies so far removed from the
conventional haunts of the Muses that the
courage of Patmore in adopting it is much to
be admired. One conceives the cachinnation of
the Philistines at the idea of an ode about a
man whose idea of a pleasant walk for a young
girl to whom he is just engaged is to show her
the tombstone of her predecessor. Patmore,
extremely moved by personal emotion, and
supported by his own strange experience, was
indifferent to ridicule. Nor can any sober critic
read the lines which describe the approach
of Amelia to the grave of Millicent without
admitting that he nobly justified his boldness —

While, therefore, now

Her pensive footstep stirr'd

The darnell'd garden of unheedful death,

She ask'd what Millicent was like, and heard

Of eyes like hers, and honeysuckle breath,

And of a wiser than a wonaan's brow,

IS

2 26 Coventry Patmore

Yet fill'd with only woman's love, and how

An incidental greatness character'd

Her unconsider'd ways.

But all my 'praise

Amelia thought too slight for Millicent,

And on my lovelier-freighted arm she leant

For more attent ;

And the tea-rose I gave

To deck her breast, she dropp'd upon the grave.

The passage must be read in its entirety,
but nowhere does Patmore give more splendid
evidence of his delicate and subtle insight into
the female heart than in the portraits which he
contrives to indicate of the two maidens, each
so demure, sweet and pathetic, and yet each
so utterly unlike the other.

In Amelia the style of Patmore reaches
almost its highest level of nervous vigour.
The form of verse which he adopts is one which
was introduced into English literature by
Cowley, with whom, as I have already said,
Patmore had considerable affinities. The
later poet was born into an age of happier taste,
and was forewarned against the errors of his
predecessor. Like Cowley, however, he had
evidently been a close student of Spenser, and

Literary Position and Aims 2 2^]

the majesty of the Prothalamion has left its
stamp upon its style. There is, too, sometimes
a murmur here of that music of Conius and
Lycidas which is often heard more loudly in
The Unknown Eros. But Spenser is the model,
if model be not too strong a word for an
influence so illusive, an influence which tinges
Amelia as that of Tennyson tinged The Angel
in the House. In neither case did the tone
approach imitation or detract from Patmore's
originality. He had been walking in these
poets' gardens, but he brought back no blossoms
with him; the most that could be urged was that
his hands still carried the perfume of their roses.
It is to be noted that the peculiar ecstasy in
the midst of which Patmore considered that his
poetical talent descended upon him, accom-
panied the composition of Amelia to an
unusual degree. It was partly for this reason,
no doubt, that he always regarded it as the
most successful of his writings, a view in which
criticism will be not disinclined to agree with
him. In fact, there is something in this poem
which is positively tantalizing, for it seems to
give evidence of a talent for interpreting in

2 2 8 Coventry Patmore

most dignified language the homely emotions
of mankind which might have drawn the whole
world to acknowledge Patmore's genius if he
could have brought himself to exercise it
frequently.

Among the odes of The Unknown Eros there
is a small group which continues the impression
formed by Amelia. These are eminently human
in their character, and deal directly with
emotions which are within the range of every
man's experience. The death of the first
Mrs. Patmore was succeeded in the poet's
heart at first by a period of feverish despair,
in the course of which he was the prey of
every desolating illusion and every desperation
of unavailing regret. Later on, to this terrible
tempest of the soul there succeeded a halcyon
time of peace, a sort of spiritual honeymoon
of memory and meditation, when he reviewed
the incidents of his loss no longer with rebellious
hopelessness, but with gratitude to God and
with serenity. It was at this time (June 13,
1863) that he wrote a memorable letter to
Dr. Garnett, in which he was able to say that
" my first nuptial joy was a poor thing com-

Literary Position and Aims 2 2()

pared with the infinite satisfaction I can now
feel in the assurance, which time has brought,
that my relation with her is as eternal as it is
happy."

It is not in the agony of bereavement but
in the calmer and less bitter period which
follows that an artist recurs to incidents of his
past anguish and gives them the immortal
character of art. We have therefore no hesita-
tion in supposing that it was in 1863 or 1864
that Patmore composed the exquisite odes
which deal with incidents in the last illness of
his wife. Mr. Basil Champneys has traced to the
record of a dream in Patmore's journal the
germ of that experience which is dealt with in
" The Azalea " :—

" Jug. 23, 1862. — Last night I dreamt that
she was dying : awoke with unspeakable relief
to find that it was a dream ; but a moment after
to remember that she was dead."

This was six weeks after Emily Patmore's
death, and we cannot suppose that it was at
this time or until many months later, that the
ode was written. It may be interesting to see
in what manner Patmore, when he came to deal

230 Coventry Patmore

with this reflex emotion in a dream, chose to
treat it, especially as " The Azalea," being one
of the shortest as well as the most perfect of
his odes, lends itself to quotation in full : —

There, where the sun shines first

Against our room,

She trained the gold Azalea, whose perfume

She, Spring-like, from her breathing grace dispersed.

Last night the delicate crests of saffron bloom,

For that their dainty likeness watch'd and nurst,

Were just at point to burst.

At dawn I dream'd, O God, that she was dead.

And groan'd aloud upon my wretched bed,

And waked, ah, God ! and did not waken her.

But lay, with eyes still closed,

Perfectly bless'd in the delicious sphere

By which I knew so well that she was near,

My heart to speechless thankfulness composed.

Till 'gan to stir

A dizzy somewhat in my troubled head —

It was the azalea's breath, and she was dead !

The warm night had the lingering buds disclosed,

And I had fall'n asleep with to my breast

A chance-found letter press'd.

In which she said,

" So, till to-morrow eve, my Own, adieu !

Parting's well-paid with ' soon again to meet ',

Soon in your arms to feel so small and sweet.

Sweet to myself that am so sweet to you ! "

This is a poem scarcely to be read, even for

Literary Position and Aims 231

the tenth time, without tears, and we can
hardly find a better example of the combina-
tion of several of Patmore's finest qualities,
the extreme intensity of his emotion, the
courage with which he bends familiar images
and experiences to his art, and the singular
distinction of the symbolism which he borrows
from external nature. Even more harrowing
in its expression of that hopeless longing for
those who have been taken from us, which the
ancients knew as desiderium, is the longer ode
entitled " Departure," in which memory
recapitulates the actual circumstances of the
death of the beloved. This marvellous poem
contains an example of what used to be called
" wit," of strange inverted reflection, which
is, to my mind, one of the most poignant
things in all literature. The lover, hanging over
the bed of the dear creature whose gentleness
and thoughtfulness have made her eyes " a
growing gloom of love," then sees her depart
abruptly.

With sudden, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten'd eye,
Upon her journey of so many days,
Without a single kiss or a good-bye.

232 Coventry Patmore

In the bewilderment of his distress, it is not
the endless bereavement that surprises him, but
the discourtesy in one who never failed in the
beauty of her manners before. He calls out
that " it is not like her great and gracious ways,"
and his wretchedness is concentrated, for a
moment, on the bitter disappointment that
the only loveless look which she ever gave him
should be that with which she leaves him. To
the same category of things almost too poignant
to be put into words, of fancies so sincere and
sorrowful that they wring the very heart,
must be added " The Toys," of which we have
already spoken ; " A Farewell," (where one of
the vexations of separation is defined, as
Wordsworth and others have defined it, in
the inability to share emotional experience, so
that

no dews blur our eyes
To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies ") ;

" If I were Dead " ; and the more mystical,

but still very human and direct " Tristitia,"

which may be taken as the poem which links

this group of odes to the austerer numbers of

The Unknown Eros.

On the political and satirical odes I do not

Literary Positio7i and Ahns 233

propose to add much to what I have said in
a previous chapter. Patmore's opinions about
public affairs were important, I think, for
their substance never, for their form sometimes.
His theory that his country was " a corpse
simulating life only by the exuberance of its
corruption " was one which did not lend itself
to fruitful projects for the future. Patmore
was one of the most impassioned public
pessimists who has ever lived ; each party was
the abomination of desolation to him, the
Outs being only a little better than the Ins
because they happened to be out.

Mr. Frederick Greenwood, who had a rare
intuition into Patmore's character and a still
rarer tact in dealing with it, contrived for a
time to induce him to express, in verse and prose
which could be printed, his grotesque views on
current politics. But Patmore himself allowed
that the newspaper which should print his
untutored lucubrations would have to be
named Tom 0' Bedlam. The reforms introduced
by Mr. Disraeli in the parliament of 1867 were
greeted by Patmore, as we have already seen,
with such jubilant irony as this : —

2 34 Coventry Patmore

In the year of the great crime,

When the false English Nobles ani their "Jew,

By God demented, slew

The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong,

One said, Take up thy song,

That breathes the mild and almost mythic time

Of England's prime !

His friends, excessively alarmed at these
prognostics, entreated him to fix for them the
date of " England's prime," but he was unable
to name a year. The ode from which these
lines are quoted, if preposterous as prophecy,
contains some noble and much vigorous
rhetoric. In "Peace," in " 1880-1885," and
" Crest and Gulf," this quality, it must be
confessed, occurs more rarely, and the poet
too often descends to the note of an angry
scold in the market-place, shrilling ever loud-
lier and less intelligibly because no one seems
to heed. Patmore saw darkly that which he
did not see with his bodily eyes. His own
circle of life, his own family, friends and
acquaintances, were dowered with every charm
and every virtue, but outside this ring he could
perceive nothing but what he called " the
amorous and vehement drift of man's herd to

Literary Position and Aims 235

hell." Mere invective, especially when directed,
without insight or examination, to all public
parties, is very tiresome, and Patmore's political
odes are scarcely readable after forty years of
historical evolution, in spite of the nervous and
picturesque phrases which abound in them.

We come, finally, to the large section of the
odes where Patmore deals, in a spirit of daring
and profound speculation, with the mysteries
of religion. In an earlier chapter we have
examined the conditions under which this
magnificent body of metaphysical poetry was
written. Patmore had become famous as the
poet of wedded love, of the exquisite bond
which unites woman to man. Now, in the
maturity of his powers, with a command of
the instrument such as he had never possessed in
earlier years, he attempted a sublimer subject,
the bond which unites the soul to God. St.
Francois de Sales says that " God, continually
taking fresh arrows from the quiver of His
infinite beauty, wounds the soul of His lovers,
making them clearly perceive that they do not
love Him half so much as He deserves their
love." Patmore had long seen that human

236 Coventry Patmore

passion is, or may be treated as, a symbol of the
divine. His mind had been drawn to this
parallel even before he became a Catholic, and
the idea was strengthened in him by the study of
some of the less mystical fathers, for instance, of
the sweet and reasonable St. Bernard. Patmore
did not consider that renunciation of all
human pleasure in a monastic life was necessary
to a high view of spiritual philosophy. On the
contrary, as one of the pillars of the Church
has said, " the innocent captives of marriage
may sing the songs of Zion in a virginity of
heart." It was a great principle with Patmore
that the cell and the hair-shirt do not encourage
high thought, but that the study of divine love
may be pushed to the most secret recesses of
its mystery by those whose daily life is made
wholesome by legitimate occupations and
sanctified pleasures.

The views which Patmore expressed, in
highly figurative language, in the course of
The Unknown Eros are fully discussed in his
letters, and in the prose fragments which
Mr. Basil Champneys has brought together with
such ardent care. Patmore interpreted love

Literary Position and Ai^ns 237

as " the mystic craving of the great to become
the love-captive of the small, while the small
has a corresponding thirst for the enthralment
of the great." This metaphor, taken from the
phenomenon of sex, he expanded in a great
variety of images and reflections, where the
Deity was represented as masculine and active,
and the human soul as feminine and passive.
Coleridge had propounded the formula, the
Father is thesis, the Son antithesis, the Holy
Spirit synthesis. Patmore accepted and adapted
this to the requirements of his sexual sym-
bohsm, defining Godhead as thesis, Manhood as
antithesis and the Neuter, " which is not the
absence of the life of sex, but its fulfilment and
power," as synthesis. The theory was worked
out with extreme boldness and fullness in the
lost prose treatise, Sfonsa Dei, which Patmore
was unhappily induced to burn in 1887.

The metaphor of sex runs through the whole
of the Unknown Eros, but is, perhaps, developed
most clearly in the three Psyche odes, in which
indeed Patmore's genius may be said to have
culminated. If we wish to study his meta-
physical poetry at its most elaborate height of

238 Coventry Patmore

subtlety and symbol, we should pass at once
to these poems.

To analyse would almost be to profane them ;
they are

Preserving-bitter, very sweet,

Few, that so all may be discreet,

And veil'd, that, seeing, none may see."

They are founded on a favourite doctrine of
Patmore's, that the Pagan myths, even when
they seem gross and earthly, contain the pure
elements of living Christian doctrine in symbol.
He found these elements in such a story as that
of Jupiter, Hercules, and Alcmena. How
much more, then, should he find them in the
starry legend of Cupid and Psyche ? But his
interpretation was not merely subtle, it was of
a burning intensity, and it is not to be sup-
posed that the very elect would be ready to
embrace it. As a matter of fact, in Patmore's
lifetime the Psyche Odes were not a little of
a stumbling-block to all but a few readers,
who themselves were apt to feel that they
wandered in these strophes

sub luce maligna,
Inter arundineasque comas, gravidumque papaver,
Et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos,

Literary Position and Aims 239

as if in a land where words had lost half their
meaning and ideas all their definition. It is
a curious fact that " obscurity " in literature
is a relative thing, and that the world soon
learns to see its way through the twilight
writers. Wordsworth and Tennyson were once
thought " obscure," and it is only quite recently
that people have ceased to seem affected if
they do not find difficulty in Browning. With
the key which we now possess, it should not be
any longer hard to open the casket of Pat-
more's mystery, although it is not certain that
all, or many, will be able to follow the symbol-
ism to its extremity without finding that its
audacity

Stings like an agile bead of boiling gold.

Patmore was very soon assured of the fact that
these poems were not welcomed, if understood,
— and least when understood, — by a majority of
English Catholics. He admitted in one of his
letters that he should have to wait for the
invisible Church if he desired to be appreciated.
In an unpublished letter Newman wrote that
" I do not like mixing up amorousness with
religion, since they are two such very irre-

240 Coventry Patmore

concilable elements " ; and the scruples of the
ordinary Catholic found voice in the entreaties
of Aubrey de Vere that Patmore would
moderate his ardour and suppress his later
poems. De Vere was the type of extreme
circumspection, who feared that Patmore
would be " absolutely misunderstood through
dullness or malignity," and that scandal would
ensue. De Vere himself was an extremely
reputable and sensitive Irish bachelor, of sub-
dued manners and nice discretion, while the
whole arc of his gentle experience contained
no fact which could excuse the ardour of his
friend, when, in a blast of incomprehensible
religious metaphysics, he burst forth with

Gaze and be not afraid,

Young Lover true and love-foreboding Maid ;

The full noon of deific vision bright

Abashes nor abates

No spark minute of Nature's keen delight, —

'Tis there your Hymen vi^aits !

But it was thus that Patmore's more ardent
genius naturally ascended in rapturous com-
munion to the Deity, and he could not bend
his fiery footsteps to walk in cool, green

Coventry Patmore.

From a Sketch /o> Siibjcxt G>on/> ly J . S. Sargent, R.A , 1S94.

Literary Position and Aims 241

meadows by the side of weaker brethren. The
fervour of his mystical and Catholic poems
has been attributed to his admiration of St.
John of the Cross. ^ I am ready to admit that
the peculiar audacity of the Psyche odes, of
" Auras of Delight," and of " Sponsa Dei,"
(the poem of that name, beginning " What is
this Maiden fair ? ") may owe not a little to
the encouragement given to the English poet
by the study of his Spanish precursor's Obras
Espirituales, but I must record that when, in
1881, I found Patmore absorbed in St. John
of the Cross, and turning back every other
instant with ecstasy to some inexpressible and
almost intolerable rapture, I received the
impression that he had but recently made the
acquaintance of the Spanish mystic. Yet by
that time his own line in the evolution of the
sex-metaphor had long been taken, and many
of his most characteristic odes had for several
years been printed. It is true that he had

1 Patmore was acquainted with the poems of the great
Spaniard only in a French prose translation. He would
have admired, had he lived to read them, the admirable
versions, in the metre of the original, which Mr. Arthur
Symons published in 1902.

16

2^2 Coventry Patmore

long been familiar with Santa Teresa, whom
it seems to me that Patmore resembled not a
little in personal character. I do not know
how it is that he quotes that "fair sister of
the seraphim " so seldom, if at all, in his writ-
ings, and I cannot find her name in Mr.
Champneys' volumes. I recollect, however,
Patmore's telling me that Santa Teresa's
Road to Perfection had exercised upon him
a profound impression. Upon the body
of his later poetry, no other influences are
marked than that of St. John of the Cross in
respect to matter, and of Milton and Spenser,
to some faint degree, in respect to manner.
This last is not to be insisted on. I confess
I see little in later Victorian literature which
bears the stamp of so much originality, com-
bined with such absolute distinction of form,
as the best of Patmore's religious odes. Their
subject, of course, must always remove them
from popular approval, but it is to be conceived
that a small circle, of those who comprehend,
may continue as time goes on to contemplate
them with an almost idolatrous admiration.
When Patmore discovered, between 1878

Literary Position and Aims 243

and 1884, that the faculty for expressing him-
self freely in verse was leaving him, he began to
embody his ideas in clear, nervous and aphor-
istic prose. He wrote four small volumes, the
first and most brilliant of which, S-ponsa Dei,
no longer exists. The otho-r^. Principle in Art
(1889), Religio Poet(B (1893), and Rod, Root
and flower (1895), contain in succinct form a
summary of what Patmore's loves and hatreds,
prejudices and inclinations and illusions, were
in the last years of his life. Principle in Art
deals mainly with the criticism of poetry and
architecture, and considerable portions of this
book had appeared, in one form or another,
long previously. Religio Poetce covers a wider
ground, but covers it in a much more frag-
mentary manner, mainly, however, in the
direction of proving that all subjects may be
treated as religion, if a man of imagination be
the teacher. Rod, Root and Flower is written
with the violence of a paradoxical old man
who feels that the end approaches, and who
lifts his voice that he may be listened to. Its
golden sayings and brief, unfinished essays will
be read with delight by those who are attracted

2 44 Coventry Patmore

to the peculiar spirit of Patmore ; to those
who know him not, they may occasionally
seem almost insane in their extravagant in-
dividualism. The author had never cared to
meet his weaker brethren half-way ; now, as
Nero is said to have done, he invites them to
walk in his garden, and darts out upon them,
dressed like a wild beast, to enjoy their terror.
The following is an example both of the vigour
of Patmore's latest prose style, and of the hard
sayings in which his mysticism indulged : —

" The obligatory dogmata of the Church are
only the seeds of life. The splendid flowers
and the delicious fruits are all in the corollaries,
which few, besides the saints, pay any atten-
tion to. Heaven becomes very intelligible and
attractive when it is discerned to be — Woman."

It was Patmore's theory that the Poet alone
has the power of so saying the truths which it
is not expedient to utter that their warmth
and light are diffused, while their scorching
brilliance remains wholly invisible. It is
certain that this theory is a sound one, but he
seemed to forget that the protection of the
poet's word lies in his art, not in himself.

Literary Position and Aims 245

Patmore, wrapped in the robe of his dark verse,
might with impunity say many things which
it was not convenient that he should say in
open prose. But it is scarcely to be believed
that the little transcendental essays which
form the section called " Magna Moralia " in
Patmore's latest book were not intended to be
translated into the nobler order. They seem
unfitted, in their present shape, to be sub-
mitted to us, because incompletely executed ;
or they give us the impression of very brilliant
prose translations from some foreign mystic
poet. If the reader, for instance, will examine
the following passage : —

" The reconcilement of the highest with the
lowest, though an infinite felicity, is an infinite
sacrifice. Hence the mysterious and apparently
unreasonable pathos in the highest and most
perfect satisfactions of love. The Bride is
always Amor is Victima. The real and inner-
most sacrifice of the Cross was the consumma-
tion of the descent of Divinity into the flesh
and its identification therewith ; and the sigh
which all creation heaved in that moment has
its echo in that of mortal love in the like descent.

2^6 Coventry Patmore

That sigh is the inmost heart of all music," —
he will feel how close its substance is to that
of some fragment of The Unknown Eros, and
he will acknowledge that all it lacks to com-
plete its beauty and significance is to be
clothed in such verse as that of " Deliciae
Sapientiae," or " Legam Tuam Dilexi." The
later prose of Patmore, it appears to me, is not
very important except as extending our know-
ledge of his mind, and as giving us a curious
collection of the raw material of his poetry.

One valuable impression, however, we gain
from a study of Patmore's later prose. We
see him as the type, in recent English literature
of a high order almost the solitary type, of
absolute faith. He was no propagandist ; he
made no efforts of any conspicuous kind to
communicate his belief to others. It was
enough for him to enjoy with emphasis his
perfect and spontaneous confidence in God.
He was not touched by curiosity or doubt,
and positive knowledge, of a scientific kind,
was without attraction to him. A passage
very characteristic of his captious and sarcastic
indifferentism occurs in the ode called " The
Two Deserts " : —

Literary Position and Aims 247

Not greatly moved with awe am I

To learn that we can spy

Five thousand firmaments beyond our own.

The best that's known

Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small . . .

The Universe, outside our living Earth,

Was all conceiv'd in the Creator's mirth . . .

Put by the Telescope !

Better without it man may see,

StretcVd awful in the husFd midnight.

The ghost of his eternity.

Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye

The things which near us lie,

Till Science rapturously hails,

In the minutest water-drop,

A torment of innumerable tails ;

These at the least do live.

Such speculations, macrocosmic or micro-
cosmic, were equally unfitted to attract Pat-
more's serious thought. He lived in a con-
templation of eternity, and he saw the whole
of existence in relation to it. There were no
softened outlines in his landscape ; he perceived,
as he thought, but two things, the radiance of
truth, crystalline and eternal, and the putre-
scence of wilful and hopeless error.

The " difhculties " which assail the modern
man did not approach him. His only trouble

248 Coventry Patmore

was lest the flame of love should burn low
upon his personal altar. Excessive in all
things, he lived in an atmosphere of spiritual
glory, haughty, narrow, violent in the extrava-
gance of his humility.

He was all prejudice, in one sense, and
yet he had, in another, no prejudices. He
embraced the unexpected in his scheme of
Catholic symbolism, and in life he was pro-
foundly indifferent to criticism of his lines of
thought. Strictly orthodox as it was his pride
to be, those who listened to his conversation
were often startled by luminous appreciation
of things which seemed to lie far removed
from the simplicity of faith. This was because
his imagination was so candid that each image
and object made an entirely new impression
upon it, unaffected by conventional tradition.
His hatreds were impulsive and instinctive ; he
encouraged them because he looked upon them
as an expression of the force with which he re-
pelled evil. If he disliked anything it must be
because it was evil, and he indulged his hatred as
being the very crown of his love of good. He had
no doubt about the path that he was destined

Literary Position and Aiins 249

to traverse, nor about his lovely and sufficient
Guide along it. He stood up against the world,
secure in his faith in God, and in poetry
which is the handmaiden of God. By a just
intuition, it w^as as Ezekiel that Mr. Sargent
was impelled to paint this the latest and
fiercest of our English prophets.

It is probably not very unsafe to predict
what Patmore's position will be in literary
history. He does not stand quite in the
central stream of the age in which he lived.
He will not be inevitably thought of as repre-
sentative of the intellect of his time, like
Tennyson, nor as a spreading human force,
like Browning, nor as a universal stimulant
and irritant, like Matthew Arnold. His con-
tributions to the national mind will be far
less general than theirs, mainly because of
his curious limitations of sympathy. Those
who do not feel broadly may have a deep, but
they cannot expect to have a wide, influence.
They cannot suffuse themselves into the
civilization of the race. The individualitv
of the three poets I have named was soluble,
and as a matter of fact particles of their

17

250 Coventry Patmore

substance flow already in the veins of every
cultivated man. Patmore was narrow, and he
was hard ; there is that in his genius which
refuses to dissolve.

Yet there is no reason why his fame should
be less durable than that of Tennyson and
Arnold, although it must always be smaller,
and of a radiance less extended. Star differeth
from star in magnitude, but a light is not
necessarily extinguished because it is of the
second species. Patmore will be preserved
by his intensity, and by the sincerity and
economy with which he employed his art.
Like Gray, like Alfred de Vigny, like Leo-
pardi (with whom he has several points in
common), he knew the confines of his strength ;
he strove not to be copious but to be uni-
formly exquisite. He did not quite reach
his aim, but even Catullus has scarcely done
that. The peculiar beauty of his verse is
not to everv one's taste ; if it were he would
have that universal attractiveness which we
have admitted that he lacks. But he wrote,
with extreme and conscientious care, and
with impassioned joy, a comparatively small

Literary Position and Ai^ns 251

body of poetry, the least successful portions
of which are yet curiously his own, while the
most successful fill those who are attuned to
them with an exquisite and durable pleasure.
It is much to his advantage that in a lax
age, and while moving dangerously near to
the borders of sentimentality, he preserved
with the utmost constancy his lofty ideal of
poetry. His natural arrogance, his solitari-
ness, helped him to battle against what was
humdrum and easy-going in the age he lived
in. He was not in any sense a leader of men.
He lacked every quality which fills others
with a blind desire to follow, under a banner,
any-whither, for the mere enthusiasm of
fighting. It was difficult even to be Pat-
more's active comrade, so ruthless was he in
checking every common movement, so deter-
mined was he to be in a protesting minority
of one. Yet his isolation, looked at from
another point of view, was a surprising evi-
dence of his strength, and it is not difficult
to believe that pilgrim after pilgrim, angry
at the excesses of the age that is coming,
and wild to correct its errors, will soothe the

2^2 Coventry Patmore

beating of his heart by an hour of medita-
tion over the lonely grave where Coventry
Patmore lies, wrapped for ever in the rough
habit of the stern Franciscan order.

THE END.

Butler and Tanner, The Sclvjood Printing Works, Frame, and London

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